Two women fill sacks of charcoal made in mud igloos in the small town of San Juan Evangelista Analco in the mountains of the state of Oaxaca in southwestern Mexico. A group of women from this Zapotec indigenous village created a charcoal company in 2017, to take advantage of the wood that the community logs sustainably. CREDIT: Emilio Godoy/IPS

By Emilio Godoy
OAXACA, Mexico, Apr 10 2020 (IPS)

Rosa Manzano carefully arranges pieces of wood in a big mud igloo that, seven days after it is full, will produce charcoal of high caloric content.

“Our forest also produces oak, which in the past was only sold as firewood and had little value. But with forest management and the work of women who have organised, we began this project,” Manzano told IPS, as she stacked the pieces of wood neatly and without leaving empty spaces inside the large igloo-shaped ovens.

Manzano belongs to the “Ka Niulas Yanni” – “active women” in the Zapotec language – Group of Women Charcoal Producers. The organisation was founded in 2017 by 10 women and two men in San Juan Evangelista Analco, a Zapotec indigenous municipality of fewer than 500 people, located in the northern highlands of the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca.

With financing from the government’s National Forestry Commission, the women built seven eight-cubic-meter igloo-shaped ovens and set up a warehouse for their community logging project. Under a 10-year plan that began in 2013, the community can extract 1,500 cubic meters of oak wood annually to make furniture and sell wood.

The charcoal makers light the ovens through a hole called a “rozadera”, and through a similar hole they check the progress of the fire and then block up the entrance with mud bricks. As the fire descends through the structure, smoke spews from the igloo’s “ears”.

“We work hard, because there is a market for charcoal, but being pioneers involves an effort,” says Manzano, a married mother of one, whose workday starts very early and ends mid-afternoon. She also works in the restaurant at a community-owned ecotourism site.

The women fire up the ovens twice a month, to produce 23-kg bags of black charcoal, which they sell for about five dollars a sack.

Wasted bioenergy

Despite these local initiatives, Mexico is wasting the potential of bioenergy, especially solid biofuels, including all forms of energy from different kinds of biomass.

This alternative source represents 10 percent of final energy consumption, with 23 million users of bioenergy for cooking (especially in rural areas), 10 million for heating (mainly in urban areas), 100,000 small factories and 100 medium and large ones, according to the Thematic Network on Bioenergy (RTB), an association of bioenergy researchers and entrepreneurs.

In Mexico, Latin America’s second-largest economy, almost 19 million tons of dry waste are produced and consumed annually in the residential sector for cooking, heating and water heating.

The installed capacity totals about 400 megawatts, based on raw materials such as firewood for domestic and industrial use, bagasse, charcoal and biogas.

Industrial uses of biomass are gaining ground in Mexico, such as the sawmill of the Sezaric Industrial Group, owned by the General Emiliano Zapata Union of Ejidos and Forest Communities, located in the municipality of Santiago Papasquiaro, in the state of Durango in northern Mexico. At the facility, forest waste fires the boiler that dries the wood and generates electricity. CREDIT: Emilio Godoy/IPS

The country also generates some 70 million tons of organic waste per year, which can be used in this area.

In terms of electricity generation, the sector’s contribution is modest – 894 gigawatt-hours (Gwh) – compared to other alternative sources of energy. In the first quarter of 2019, gross generation totaled 80,225 Gwh, up from 78,167 in the same period last year. Gas-fired combined cycle plants produced 40,094, conventional thermal power plants 9,306 and coal-fired plants 6,265.

Hydroelectric plants accounted for 5,137 Gwh, wind farms 4,285, nuclear plants 2,382 and solar stations 1,037.

One technology that is expanding is the biodigester, for the treatment of manure and agricultural waste to obtain biogas and electricity. Some 900 of these operate in rural areas. Of this total, around 300 generate electricity, according to the state-run Shared Risk Trust.

In this country of 130 million people, around 19 million use solid fuels for cooking, according to the National Institute of Statistics and Geography. The main material consumed by 79 percent of these households is LPG, followed by firewood or coal (11 percent) and natural gas (seven percent).

In the southwestern state of Oaxaca, gas and firewood each represent 49 percent of household consumption.

“It is a renewable energy that is largely untapped in the areas of agriculture, urban waste and industry,” said Abel Reyes, president of the non-governmental Mexican Association of Biomass and Biogas.

The expert stressed to IPS that if the country were to develop the sector’s value chain, it would be equivalent to five or six points of GDP, with energy, economic, labour, health and climate benefits.

While bioethanol and biodiesel have boomed over the past decade, their growth now seems to be slowing down due to high costs compared to alternative sources and to competition with food crops.

Teresa Arias, president of the non-governmental organisation Nature and Development, noted that the industrial sector is interested in using waste to fire boilers, while households, hospitals, restaurants and hotels can use pellets of agglomerated sawdust.

“The most viable variables are determined by the market. It has a lot to do with competitiveness against fossil fuels. Solid biomass does not compete with natural gas, and in hotel heating it could compete with liquefied petroleum gas,” she told IPS.

The environmentalist said that “there is enough biomass for electricity, its costs just have to be lower or equal to those of the fuel they currently use. But it couldn’t compete with solar, although mixed systems could be installed.”

Forest and jungle management, agro-industrial residues, forest plantations, sugar cane and agricultural waste offer the greatest biomass potential. Replacing fossil fuels with bioenergy and solid biofuels would mean savings of some 6.7 billion dollars a year, in addition to social and environmental benefits, according to the RTB.

Although Mexico has adopted ambitious goals for bioenergy, the pro-fossil fuel policies of leftist President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, in office since December 2018, have clouded the picture, according to analysts.

The 2017 “Biogas Technology Roadmap” predicts production of between 32 million and 120 million cubic meters of biomethane per year from animal waste by 2024, and 57 million to 100 million by 2030, in the face of barriers such as low production attractiveness and lack of project financing.

With respect to solid biofuels in 2030, the map projects 160 petajoules of energy, 130 of which would correspond to households, 20 to the commercial sector and 10 to government institutions. The joule is the energy measurement unit that is equivalent to one watt per second and estimates the amount of heat required to carry out an activity. Each petajoule represents one quadrillion joules.

Arias, the environmentalist, who is preparing diagnoses of biomass in the north of the country, said the outlook is discouraging, because “there is no defined and determined policy for pushing alternative energies.

“They’re taking a position that looks to the past instead of the future; they’re taking steps backwards after many efforts to have a diverse energy mix that would make us less vulnerable, and to transition to climate benefits,” she said.

In this context, she proposed incentives for their use in households and businesses; adapting commercial technologies to the conditions in Mexico; increasing the efficiency of supply chains; disseminating the benefits of bioenergy; implementing favourable policies for this sources; and designing programmes for rural areas.

For his part, Reyes, from the Biomass Association, called for the design of regional and local policies, aimed at boosting the use of bioenergy with adequate financial support.

Meanwhile, the charcoal makers of San Juan Evangelista know what they want: to take care of the forest, foment self-employment and consolidate their organisation and thus their community.

“We are trying to earn an income, but we are working precisely because we know it has a future. We’ve tried to organise ourselves as women, because in the social sphere it’s difficult to get out,” Manzano said during the day that IPS accompanied their activities in this town, 48 km from Oaxaca, the state capital, and 540 km from Mexico City.

Along with other Oaxacan community-owned companies, the group offers its products on new digital platforms.

Some say the government does not support initiatives like those of her group, but Manzano and her colleagues are confident that wood and charcoal will continue to be available in Mexican kitchens thanks to sustainable efforts like theirs.

Kehmli Devi, a middle-aged Indian woman, bends over her wood-burning stove in her home in northern India. Credit: Athar Parzaiv/IPS

By Athar Parvaiz
NEW DELHI, Mar 5 2015 (IPS)

For years, Kehmli Devi, a middle-aged woman from the village of Chachadeth in India’s northern Himalayan state of Uttarakhand, has prepared her family’s meals on a wood-burning stove.

She is one of millions of Indian women who cannot afford cooking gas and so relies heavily on firewood as a source of free fuel.

Gathering wood is a cumbersome exercise, but Devi has no choice. “It takes us five to six hours to gather what we need each day – we have to travel far into the woods to collect it,” she tells IPS. “But we don’t mind, since we don’t have to pay for it.”

“It takes us five to six hours to gather [the firewood] we need each day – we have to travel far into the woods to collect it." -- Kehmli Devi, a housewife in the northern India state of Uttarakhand, who has cooked for years on a wood-burning stove
Buying a cylinder of liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), even at subsidized rates, is not an option for her – her entire family makes a collective monthly income of 57 dollars, which works out to less than two dollars a day. They cannot afford to spend a cent of their precious earnings on cleaner fuel.

Further north, in the state of Jammu and Kashmir, a similar story unfolds in thousands of households every single day.

“If my husband had enough money, we would use LPG for cooking,” says Zeba Begam, who resides in Rakh, a village in southern Kashmir. But since the family lives well below the poverty line, their only option is to use to firewood.

At first, they struggled to live with the smoke caused by burning large quantities of wood in their small, cramped home. Now, Begam says, they are used to it – but this does not make them immune to the range of health problems linked to indoor air pollution.

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), around three billion people cook and heat their homes using open fires and mud stoves burning biomass (wood, animal dung and crop waste), as well as coal.

Improper burning of such fuels in confined spaces releases a range of dangerous chemical substances including hazardous air pollutants (known as HAPs), fine particle pollution (more commonly called ash) and volatile organic compounds (VOC).

The WHO estimates that around 4.3 million people die each year from diseases attributable to indoor air pollution, including from chronic respiratory conditions such as pneumonia, lung cancer and even strokes.

Other studies show that indoor air pollution – particularly in poorly ventilated dwellings – is linked to adverse pregnancy outcomes in women and negatively impacts children, who are more susceptible to respiratory diseases than adults.

In general, women and children are at far greater risk of suffering the impacts of indoor pollution since they spend longer hours at home.

Millions of Indians at risk

Indoor air pollution is recognised as a pressing issue around the world, particularly in Asia, but India seems to be carrying the lion’s share of the burden, with scores of Indian households relying on traditional fuels for cooking, lighting and heating.

Data from the Government of India’s 2011 Census shows an estimated 75 million rural households (45 percent of total rural households) living without electricity, while 142 million rural households (85 percent of the total) depend entirely on biomass fuel, such as cow-dung and firewood, for cooking.

Despite heavy subsidisation by successive federal governments in New Delhi since 1985 to make cleaner fuels like LPG available to the poor, millions of households still struggle to make the necessary payments for cleaner energy, opting for more traditional, more harmful, substances.

Some estimates put Indian households’ use of traditional fuels at 135 million tons of oil equivalent (MTOE), larger than Australia’s total energy consumption in 2013.

Cleaner energy to meet the MDGs

Experts say that there is an urgent need to drastically reduce these numbers, both to improve the lives of millions who will benefit from cleaner energy, and also to meet international poverty-reduction and sustainability targets.

For instance, indoor air pollution is linked in numerous ways to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the U.N.’s largest development initiative set to expire at the end of the year.

According to the WHO, tackling the issue of dirty household fuels will automatically feed into MDG4, which pledges to reduce child mortality by two-thirds by the end of the year; since children bear a disproportionate rate of the disease burden of indoor pollution, helping families switch to cleaner energies could result in longer life spans for their children.

Similarly, women and children spend countless hours collecting firewood, a task that consumes much of their day and a great deal of energy. Reducing this burden on women and children would bring India closer to achieving the goal of gender equality and women’s empowerment.

Less time spent on fuel collection also leaves more hours in the day for education or employment, both of which could contribute to MDG1, eradicating extreme poverty and hunger by 2015.

In 2005, the World Bank’s World Development Report (WDR) put the economic and health cost of collecting and using firewood at some six billion dollars in India alone, representing massive waste in a country nursing a stubborn poverty rate of 21.9 percent of a population of 1.2 billion people.

For Zeba Begam, a resident of the Himalayan state of Jammu and Kashmir, cooking with clean fuel is a distant dream. Credit: Athar Parvaiz/IPS

Moving towards a sustainable future

As the United Nations moves towards a new era of sustainable development, scientists and policy-makers are pushing governments hard to tackle the issue of indoor air pollution in a bid to severely slash overall global carbon emissions.

Veerabhadran Ramanathan, director of the Centre for Atmospheric Sciences at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California in San Diego, told IPS that the provision of clean energy, particularly for the poor, should be on the agenda at the upcoming climate talks in Paris, where world leaders are expected to agree on much-awaited binding carbon emissions targets for the coming decade.

Ramanathan argued that it was the responsibility of the rich – what he called the ‘top four billion’ or T4B – to help the ‘bottom three billion’ (B3B) climb the renewable energy ladder instead of the fossil fuel ladder.

“In order to avoid unsustainable climate changes in the coming decades, the decarbonisation of the T4B economy as well as the provision of modern energy access to B3B must begin now,” he said at last month’s Delhi Sustainable Development Summit (DSDS).

His words reflect countless international initiatives to cut emissions from dirty household fuels, including the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves, which estimates that a transition to clean cook-stoves could reduce emissions from wood fuels by up to 17 percent.

Quoting findings from a recent study conducted by experts at Yale University and National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), Radha Mutthiah, executive director of the Global Alliance, said last month that her organisation planned to “target areas where clean cooking technology can have the greatest impact, not only improving the effects on climate, but also the health of millions of people living in hotspots.”

These ‘hotspots’ have been defined as regions where firewood is being harvested on an unsustainable scale, with over 50 percent non-renewability. In total some 275 million people live in hotspots, of which 60 percent reside in South Asia.

Overall, India and China were found to have the world’s highest wood-fuel emissions, which experts say should serve as a wake-up call to policymakers and legislators that the time for taking action is now

* This story has been updated. An earlier version carried a quote from a former senior official at The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), who has since resigned.

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida