been clarified, thus reducing access. Given the vast potential for fuel substitution, the welfare implications of interventions will vary over time, space, and according to household characteristics.

In the following sections, we review the literature on welfare implications of fuelwood scarcity and associated interventions. Most households have very few assets beyond their own labor. Although the monetary value of female labor expended in household chores is seldom estimated it is nevertheless essential for the survival of the household. Since energy collection and use is labor intensive, it is expected that energy interventions primarily affects household welfare through the intra-household labor allocation. Here we will focus on four aspects of this labor allocation: first of all any evidence of a (i) direct impact of woodfuel access on women‘s time use, then whether access has any (ii) impact on agricultural production, or (iii) off-farm income and finally on (iv) education.

We start by noting that, despite the many potential substitution mechanism ameliorating woodfuel scarcity, households in many cases respond to increasing scarcity of fuelwood by using less. Many household studies indicate that fuelwood consumption decreases as market or shadow prices increase, although typically not by a large amount (Cooke et al., 2008; Hyde and Köhlin, 2000; Heltberg et al., 2000, Linde-Rahr, 2003; Pattanayak et al., 2004; Van‘t Veld et al., 2006).

**_2.2.1 The implications of woodfuel access on women’s time use_**

**The academic case study literature indicates that households in general and women specifically, tend to spend more time collecting fuelwood as it becomes scarcer. However, the intra-household labor allocation to collection is affected both by cultural norms and relative productivity and opportunity costs.  Thus, the** **_potential_ welfare gain for women from increased woodfuel access is great, but needs careful targeting and design that considers the many margins on which households adapt when fuelwood grows scarcer.**

The fuelwood collection literature generally does not examine specific interventions but rather general indicators of scarcity. Most empirical results from Nepal and India indicate that households tend to spend more time collecting fuelwood as it becomes more costly as measured by either market price (Amacher et al., 1999), by a shadow price (Cooke, 1998a), or by a physical measurement such as decreases in forest stock or decreases in forest accessibility (Amacher et al., 1993a; Köhlin, 1998; Heltberg et al., 2000). There is also evidence that women spend more time collecting when availability decreases<sup>17</sup> (Kumar and Hotchkiss, 1988; Cooke, 1998a). Van‘t Veld et al. (2006), on the other hand, find that households do not spend more time searching for fuelwood when biomass availability from common areas decreases<sup>18</sup> . Rather, fewer women choose to collect fuelwood from the village forest commons in villages where these are degraded. Instead, they use fuelwood from private trees or agricultural waste as fuel. Cooke 1998a and Van‘t Veld 2006 also find clear seasonality in collection, with more collection, particularly by men, in the dry season which is also the agricultural slack season. This highlights the many margins on which households may adapt when fuelwood becomes scarcer. Still, there is much to learn about how interventions can relieve energy poverty triggered by various constraints.

> 17 A reviewer pointed out the potential contradiction in that women do not always collect a majority of the fuel with the findings that they spend more time collecting when availability decreases. Interestingly enough, in the studies reported here, collection by women seems to be more sensitive to changes in availability than male collection.

> 18 Van‘t Veld et al (p.4) also point out that in most studies that estimate the relationship between time spent collecting and forest degradation, the measures of fuelwood availability are indirect (eg time spent to collect 20 kg) and likely endogenous. Since unobservable, household-level characteristics that affect the total time spent in collection are likely to affect the time spent collecting a fixed quantity of firewood in the same direction, these measures of scarcity are likely endogenous, and possibly biased towards finding the result that these studies report (i.e., that time spent collecting increases with scarcity). In contrast, Van‘t Veld et al uses a direct physical measure of firewood availability, namely, the volume of biomass available per household in the village. Köhlin and Amacher (2005) use distance to forest measured in a GIS from village to a certain quality of forest (NDVI based).

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