So you think you can’t reduce energy poverty, cut greenhouse gas emissions, create jobs, and turn a profit at the same time in one of the world’s poorest countries?
Conor Fox thinks otherwise.
posts
UGANDA: Landslide linked to deforestation kills hundreds.
(BBC) More than 300 people are feared dead after heavy rain caused a series of landslides in the mountainous eastern region of Bududa in Uganda. A trading centre in a village was flattened, leaving shops and houses buried under the mud, officials said. Rescuers are digging in the mud with hand-held tools as mechanical diggers cannot reach the affected villages. President Yoweri Museveni visited the affected area, and criticised residents for settling on a floodplain. The president also said the disaster could be partially blamed on local farmers for stripping the land of thick plant life. Some 86 deaths have been confirmed, with local officials saying at least 250 people remain missing.
Nicaragua: Of Hurricanes, Volcanoes, Crocodiles, and Energy Poverty
In October 1998 I walked out of a Costa Rican jungle after narrowly escaping a disastrous film shoot with crocodiles.
The near fiasco had nothing to do with filming the animals up close in their natural habitat. Instead, what almost sunk the project was the relentless pounding of a tropical rain that soaked everything and everyone.
Back in our hotel in San Jose we discovered the cause of the rain was a major hurricane that had slowly swept across the Central American isthmus, causing massive death and destruction in Guatemala, Honduras, and in my home country, Nicaragua. Nearly 11,000 people were killed. The flooding caused extreme damage, estimated at over $5 billion (1998 USD, $6.5 billion 2008 USD).
CHAD: Panic, outcry at government charcoal ban
A government ban on charcoal in the Chadian capital N’djamena has created what one observer called “explosive” conditions as families desperately seek the means to cook.
“As we speak women and children are on the outskirts of N’djamena scavenging for dead branches, cow dung or the occasional scrap of charcoal,” Merlin Totinon Nguébétan of the UN Human Settlements Programme (HABITAT) in Chad, told IRIN from the capital. “People cannot cook.”
“Women giving birth cannot even find a bit of charcoal to heat water for washing,” Céline Narmadji, with the Association of Women for Development in Chad, told IRIN. (More) Continue reading
The East African Briquettes Company points the way to sustainable biomass alternative
Nicholas Harrison is the driving force behind one new idea in Tanzania: the East Africa Briquettes Company. Harrison purchased the factory in Tanga in March 2009 where he now produces the “mkaa bora,” a briquette that burns “longer, hotter, and cheaper” than conventional vegetable charcoal.
The country consumes about one million tons of wood charcoal each year, so the market is huge. And with a deforestation-to-replacement rate of 3-to-1, there is little chance Tanzania will be able to keep pace with the country’s demand for charcoal, especially in the growing capital.