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Jeffrey Goko Climate Story
Household access to electricity — particularly rural households— will not automatically lead to an end in deforestation in Zimbabwe.
Now that’s according to a new study by Ellen Fungisai Chipango, a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Johannesburg. The research attempted to establish how the environment was embedded in the political economy.
Chipango argues that there are several interlinked factors fuelling forest loss in rural areas, such as poverty, which cannot be addressed solely by electrifying homes or tightening laws and policy around deforestation.
“Politicians, policy makers and development agencies should save the economy first,” she asserts, in a study titled: ‘Reinterpreting energy poverty in Zimbabwe: A scalar perspective’.
“This would in turn save the woodlands. Quick fixes such as electricity access for households alone don’t save the woodlands,” Chipango said, adding, “a political-ecological framework is needed to address rural energy needs and deforestation.”
“Only when underlying factors are addressed will interventions such as rural electrification and renewable energy technologies have an impact,” she observed.
Fuelwood is indispensable to the rural energy economy. Zimbabwean rural families meet more than 90 percent of their cooking energy needs mainly by using firewood, and 20 percent of urban households use wood as the main cooking fuel.
Along with tobacco curing, agriculture and urban development, firewood use is one of the biggest causes of deforestation in the country.
According to the UN.’s Food and Agriculture Organisation, Zimbabwe lost 327 000 hectares of plantation forests and natural woodland on average each year between 1990 and 2010. Now there are only 15,6 million hectares remaining.
The Zimbabwe Government has been on a mission to bring both renewable and non-renewable electricity to rural communities for decades, with citizens forced to fund the programme through a small tax levied with every purchase of power.
In her study, carried out in Buhera district, Manicaland, Chipango believes she has found some of the important factors that make people use the environment in a manner that degrades it. She quotes one Buhera villager:
“Poverty has gotten into our woodlands. We no longer fetch wood to use in the kitchen only, but for burning bricks for sale…”
For Chipango, the die is cast. She points out that the practices are energy-intensive, usually fulfilled with an axe to the root of native tree species like mopane or acacia. But rural people are doing so only in order to survive – a cycle that Chipango refers to as “desperate ecocide”.
“The problem is too complex to be analysed at household level without teasing out a chain of explanations behind the degrading use of the environment,” Chipango elaborated.
“More often than not, conservation analysts have discovered the ‘degrading’ activities of the poor, but rarely acknowledged that such problems are rooted in the broader political economy, which forces many rural societies to increase their pressure on the environment,” she said.
Top-down approaches, in which policymakers download environmental policies to rural people, criticising them for their “lack of environmental consciousness and their irrationality” will never work, according to the study.
Instead, it would be judicious for the policy elite to realise that laws must be developed and function in context. “Otherwise, criminalisation of a means of survival jeopardises livelihoods,” it said.
Chipango potentially stirred a Hornet’s nest, questioning the effectiveness of tree planting in tackling both deforestation and climate change effects such as water shortages and floods.
Per the research: “For such interventions (tree planting) to work, they must be tailored to the social–ecological context, or more problems may be created.
“For instance, planting trees in historical grasslands and savannas can harm native ecosystems and species. Also, the view that forests increase rainfall has remained tenuous. Likewise, the debate over the effect of deforestation on flooding is partly inconclusive.”
Models show deforestation could result in a decline in precipitation of more than 5 percent across Zimbabwe by 2050, say experts.
The Energy Ministry says the country is not expected to produce enough non-wood power and become fully energy secure much later in this decade, when a number of planned power projects are due to go online.
God is faithful.
Online Reporter