A few weeks ago a story in the Financial Times led with the stove project of Mercy Corps, a relief agency working in camp for Internally Displaced People in North Kivu, Democratic Republic of Congo. We wanted to know more so we sent a list of questions to Elisha Moore-Delate. She is the Environment Program Manager for Mercy Corps in the Democratic Republic of Congo and the person responsible for the stoves program. We’re sharing her inspiring and insightful responses below. 1. When, and how, did you realize that introducing energy efficient stoves would help improve conditions for the IDPs? Continue reading
Charcoal
Can – or should – the charcoal trade be regulated?
A dispatch from Kenya this morning made me wonder if efforts to ban the charcoal trade in various African countries is at all effective. Can it be enforced? Who suffers? Has this strategy yielded results somewhere? I don’t know. What is clear is that the pace of decimation of African forests for charcoal and woodfuel is rapidly reaching crisis point in various countries — Uganda, Malawi, parts of Kenya and Tanzania. Excerpts from news dispatches help paint a picture. From the article mentioned earlier, reported by Wildlife Direct: “According to Elias Kimaru of the Kwale landscape project of the WWF Continue reading
Video: Africa’s forest have a lot to offer in Copenhagen
There is an excellent film by South Africa-based photojournalist Jeffrey Barbee that will hopefully get quite a bit of play in Copenhagen. It explores how African forests and woodfuel efficiency can play a big role in reducing CO2 emissions while improving people’s livelihood. We were especially interested to learn through this film about a stoves project in Malawi which is not only improving the lives the local inhabitants but also providing valuable carbon credits to an eco securities firm for sale on the voluntary carbon market. (The segment about Malawi and the stoves begins at 5:40 on part 2 but Continue reading
On Environmental Brink, Haiti Scrambles for a Lifeline
“With any reforestation campaign, you have to find first a solution for energy.” — Antonio Perera, Program Manager, UNEP, Haiti The satellite image compares forest cover along the Haiti-Dominican Republic Border. A recent New York Times article explains what happens when a country’s energy-poor population exhausts its last remaining fuelwood resources. The country is Haiti and the picture painted is not pretty. With much of its forest cover gone, the poorest (and oldest) developing country in the Western Hemisphere’s stands now on the brink of environmental catastrophe. The story, reported by Nathaniel Gronewold of Greenwire, the web-based environmental policy and Continue reading
Uganda will need to import firewood in 2020
A report by Uganda’s Ministry of Water and the Environment says the country will need to import firewood in 2020 if current rates of deforestation and fuelwood consumption are not abated. Quoting the report, Uganda’s Monitor newspaper says that”with 91 per cent of the total energy used being derived from biomass, which includes firewood and charcoal. The Ministry warns that, the pressure on forests and woodlands could easily wipe out the country’s capacity to provide the resource.” “At the present rate of deforestation, it is predicted that Uganda is likely to be importing fuel wood by 2020,” says the report, Continue reading