Publications

Is charcoal a sustainable energy source in Africa? This is a crucial question, given charcoal’s key importance to urban energy. In today’s dominant policy narrative – the charcoal-crisis narrative – charcoal is deemed incompatible with sustainable and modern energy, blamed for looming ecological catastrophe, and demanding replacement. However, an emerging sustainability-through-formalization narrative posits that charcoal can be made sustainable – specifically, through formalization of production, trade, markets, and consumption technologies.

Biomass energy, mainly as solid biomass charcoal and firewood (woodfuel), plays a significant role as cooking energy in Kenya, as in many other countries in Africa. Despite its multiple benefits, unsustainable practices have negative environmental and health impacts.

The report assesses how much wood we are likely to have now and in the future to support a transformational change towards a circular bioeconomy, and explores the potential and implications for its uses.

As renowned scientists Tom Lovejoy and Carlos Nobre have put it, “The tipping point is here, it is now. A modern vision of the Amazon must include truly innovative elements to create profitable bioeconomies that would immediately eliminate illogical and short-sighted economies.”

Biochar has significant potential to be part of the solution to overcome those obstacles, as it improves soil properties – in particular, for highly weathered, nutrient-poor, or acid soil under an arid or semi-arid climate; and for lowest income households or communities in rural parts of low and middleincome countries.

Populations in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) living on the fringes of forests indubitably rely on them for income and subsistence. But unsustainable practices can lead to resource degradation and depletion, threatening the very basis of their livelihoods. A forest-based ‘circular’ bioeconomy approach could stabilize sustainable natural resource use, yet bioeconomy strategies so far have focused mostly on technology and economics, rather than on matters of social sustainability.

Growing bioenergy crops on degraded and underutilized land is a promising solution to meet the requirement for energy security, food security, and land restoration. This paper assesses the socioeconomic and environmental benefits of agroforestry systems based on nyamplung (tamanu) (Calophyllum inophyllum L.) in the Wonogiri district of Central Java, Indonesia.

This study spatially estimated degraded lands in Indonesia that have limited functions for food production, carbon storage, and conservation of biodiversity and native vegetation and examined their suitability to grow biodiesel species (Calophyllum inophyllum, Pongamia pinnata, and Reutealis trisperma) and biomass species (Calliandra calothyrsus and Gliricidia sepium).