[Stoves] Energy supply and use in a rural West African village

Bryden, Kenneth [M E] kmbryden at iastate.edu
Sat Jun 2 16:29:59 CDT 2012


Crispin,

We didn't examine the yield of the forests around the village we were focused on energy use and impact but not deforestation questions. That said by careful examination over a period of five years it appears that the forest is being sustainably managed. Also in interviews with village women, every woman in the village thought she was walking the same distance to gather wood and that it took the same amount of time since she was a child. Wood is gathered on plots assigned by the village leadership and only fallen/dead wood is gathered.

I think this type of sustainable management is possible in this village because it is the Sahel, Mali is relatively sparsely populated, and this village is relatively remote. It is part of a cluster of 8 villages with a combined population of 7000 - 8000. The closest villages to the study village are 6 and 10 km away and have populations of 300 people each, the villages beyond these two are more than 10 km away. And so pressure on the forests is not great. I do know that these are semi nomadic people and that part of the village moves to the fields during the growing season and that villages have moved periodically in the past. But as improvements (bridges, schools, clinics) are made I've wondered if the villages will move or not.

In contrast in other places in Mali (Mali is only 15% arable land) wood and other fuels are dear and sustainability is a big issue. And so this study should be regarded as applicable to the Sahel rather than to Mali.

Mark


On Jun 2, 2012, at 10:50 AM, Crispin Pemberton-Pigott wrote:

Dear Mark

Yeah that is about 1 kg per person per day – quite efficient compared with Zimbabwe or Angola.

My next questions was about the area from which that wood is collected. Is there a known sustained yield per ha that gives a ‘farmable’ area for wood fuel? I am given to understand (from multiple sources) that the Sahel is (net) being de-forested. But on the other hand, the Sahel is expanding northward into the Sahara and no one is talking about it so it could be observer bias like that old story about ‘the southward march of the Sahel’.

There is a group I believe east of your working area that has a traditional lifestyle of semi-permanent-ism whereby they move the village about every 40 years. When they do, the establish all the trees they need – food and fuel – then live there until it is overgrown and move to new grasslands. The result is an expanding forest. I read a criticism of their lifestyle that ‘wrecked the grassland with new forests’.  Because forests create more forest, and deforestation creates droughts, I wondered how the fuel wood supply was managed in your study area.

Thanks
Crispin


Crispin

Yes (and I think it is closer to 290 tons) - if you look at Figure 1 you'll see that this is low for Africa (although not the lowest) based on more approximately 40 other reports and in the band for reported values for Mali. Given that Mali is one of the poorest countries in Africa this would be expected. We have second paper currently in review that provides much more detail on the stoves use and on the fuels used.

Mark

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