Moreover, charcoal has adverse health effects for its users. At the same time, charcoal constitutes an important income source in deprived rural areas, while the current alternative, gas, is a mostly imported fossil fuel. We find that 195 million people in sub-Saharan Africa rely on charcoal as their primary cooking fuel and gauge that another 200 million use charcoal as secondary fuel. Our scenarios suggest that clean cooking initiatives are outweighed by strong urban population growth and hence charcoal usage is expected to remain high over the coming decades. Policies should therefore target end-users, forest management, and regulation of charcoal production to enable sustainable production and use of charcoal
Traditional biomass accounts for almost 75 percent of the total energy use in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA, excluding South Africa), and it is mostly used for cooking. This share has barely changed over the past 25 years. In rural areas, people use firewood, while charcoal is the dominant cooking fuel in urban areas because it is easier to transport. Charcoal consumption is thriving in SSA given the urbanization trends on the continent in the past two decades, which might be accelerated by advancing estimates an annual demand growth rate of four percent since 2000, and 60 percent of the world’s charcoal is already produced in SSA. In this paper, we estimate the current number of charcoal users in SSA and trends for the coming decades, mostly based on the latest UN population projections and charcoal usage data from the Demographic and Health Surveys.
Governments and international donors seek to support a transition away from biomass fuels and invest in promoting electricity and liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), guided by SDG 7.1 that postulates universal access to clean cooking by 2030. Yet, progress has been slow, with only 16 percent of households in SSA having access to clean cooking, partly due to a growing population. The negative consequences of Covid-19 will further hamper dissemination of clean fuels.
The continued reliance on charcoal has its two sides: on the one hand, charcoal is problematic from an environmental perspective. In terms of forest degradation, charcoal is more harmful than firewood. First, because it is more wood-intense per calorific unit, second, because larger trunks and branches are used for its production, which degrades forests more than extensive firewood collection, and third because it is often extracted under unsustainable forest management regimes.
Charcoal’s forest degradation effect also contributes to climate change, according to estimates around one percent of global anthropogenic emissions. This amount is noteworthy even if minimal compared to other energy consumption emissions from industrialized and emerging countries – hard coal and lignite, for example, contributed 28 percent to global anthropogenic emissions in 2018.
On the other hand, charcoal is locally produced and creates a reliable income source and employment in otherwise often deprived rural areas. According to the World Bank, charcoal creates between 200 and 350 local jobs for each TJ of consumed energy while electricity creates around 80 to 110, and LPG only 10 to 20 jobs.
A Guest Editorial