# **2 Access to Woodfuels through Tree Plantation and Forest Management**

## **2.1 Brief description of interventions and intended impacts**

**Since the 1970s, many interventions have aimed to increase access to woodfuels and decrease women’s collection efforts. At first, the focus was on the establishment of plantations (primarily fast growing exotics such as eucalyptus) with variations in the management. Later on, the emphasis has gradually shifted toward community-based woodfuel management (as in Bank-supported projects in Niger, Mali and Senegal) in line with the global trend towards devolution of forest management to communities The impact on women depends on their participation in collection, as well as their relationship to the management structure put in place by interventions. Since management often implies exclusion, there is a risk that women, and other less powerful groups in society, are negatively affected, at least in the short run.**

Arnold et al (2006) describe the changing perspectives on woodfuel<sup>14</sup> interventions since the mid1970s<sup>15</sup> . It started with the recognition that huge and growing numbers of people depended on fuelwood as their principal domestic fuel (Eckholm, 1975; Agarwal, 1986). This led to predictions of potentially devastating depletion of forest resources, with serious negative livelihood consequences for the rural poor, unless action was taken to address this ―fuelwood crisis‖. Fueled by ―gap models‖, large-scale plantation projects were implemented with the expectation that they would provide easily accessible fuel, reduce time spent collecting fuelwood, improve nutrition and reduce deforestation and environmental degradation. Already by the mid-1980s, both the underlying analysis and the efficiency of the interventions were seriously criticized. For example, it was pointed out that gap models did not account for the price elasticities of demand and supply of fuelwood. Dewees (1989) argued that the gap models grossly underestimated actual supply, because the models were based on stock and yield figures relating to forest resources, whereas most fuelwood in practice comes from woody plant resources other than forests - scrub, bush fallow, farm trees etc – and much of this can and does regenerate. Leach and Mearns (1988) noted that ‖By ignoring these flaws, gap methods have done much to exaggerate the scale of the woodfuel problem and foster inappropriate, large-scale, energy-focused remedies at the expense of other actions which could have done more to improve welfare, reduce deforestation, and generally support sustainable development‖.

As a consequence, during the 1990s, most of the fuelwood-oriented forestry programs that had been put in place in the 1970s and 1980s were terminated or scaled back (Arnold et al. 2006). The focus shifted to devolution of forest management such as Joint Forest Management in India, Forest User Groups in Nepal, Participatory Forest Management in Tanzania and World Bank funded CommunityBased Woodfuel Resources Management in Niger, Mali and Senegal.

World Bank (2010a) reviews Bank projects dealing with household access to woodfuels and stoves over the last 20 years. The review shows that the Bank projects follow the general trends described above. Over the last 20 years, 19 projects have been implemented with a total budget of 1.25 billion USD out of which 161 million USD have supported various household energy access components dealing with woodfuel and stoves. All projects, except one, were implemented in SSA and as many as half (10 projects) in West Africa. There has thus also been a change in geographical focus from South Asia towards Africa.

> 14 We will use the same terminology as Arnold et al. and in woodfuel include fuelwood and charcoal but not the use of biomass as feedstock for other sources of energy such as biogas.

> 15 The paper was the outcome of a CIFOR project called _“Fuelwood: Crisis or Balance?”_ that investigated in some depth the arguments of a fuelwood crisis in the 1970‘s and its antithesis of balance in terms of fuelwood supply of the 1980‘s.

11