Communities living in and around the forests continue to depend on them for meeting their energy requirements. Studies have consistently highlighted the negative health consequences that firewood usage has, especially on women and children. Sustained firewood extraction also leads to rapid forest degradation which in turn affects the region’s water, ecological security and eventually economic development.
The 1,200 sq. km. area of Bramhapuri Forest Division is one of the most important non-protected forest blocks in the Central Indian Landscape (CIL). This region supports over 48 adult tigers and forms an important corridor between tiger reserves in Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Telangana. This forest is dotted with 608 villages that are occupied by some of the most marginalised communities, dependent on forest for their day-to-day sustenance. It was imperative that evidence-based policy recommendations are provided to curb this practice. Hence, the project ‘Arresting forest degradation by addressing firewood consumption’ was undertaken with the following objectives:
- To understand drivers for firewood extraction
- To find alternatives for firewood
- To design and pilot schemes for reducing firewood consumption
- Make policy recommendations to the concerned government departments
Alternate technology for water heating, namely efficient biomass-fired water heater (called bumbb in Marathi language) was identified based on WCT’s long-term socio-economic studies, and a pilot scheme to introduce it was designed and executed in select villages. The research team from WCT, comprising economists, psychologists, sociologists and wildlife biologists, has been studying the complex factors that drive the extraction of forest resources, and the use of fuelwood. The team’s work shows that a significant amount of wood collected by villagers is used for water heating, exposing women to the ill-effects of the smoke, as well as the burden of carrying headloads of fuelwood from the forest. Considering these and a host of other factors, this team of interdisciplinary researchers came up with an energy efficient and affordable solution – the biomass-fired water heater. Suited perfectly for water heating in Indian villages, where other water heating technologies are either unaffordable or environmentally unsustainable and unhealthy, the bumbb consumes just one-third of the fuelwood consumed by the traditional wood-based stove to heat the same quantity of water. Importantly, it can be easily fuelled by crop residue, dung cakes, dry leaves and used paper, drastically reducing the need to collect fuelwood for domestic purposes. WCT started the on-ground promotion campaign of the water heater in September 2019, and began offering it to households at one-fourth its original cost in December 2019.
WCT collected granular household-level data on socio-economic and psychosocial drivers that lead to firewood extraction. A total of 2,098 households were surveyed from 49 villages located around the Ghodazari WLS in the Chandrapur district of Maharashtra. Results of the study were published in a report titled ‘Inequity, Incentives and Institutions: A Landscape Approach to Sustainable Development Goals’.
In addition to this study, a rapid ethnography was carried out in the villages identified for rolling out the pilot project. The objective was to understand the fuel consumption behaviour and water heating practices of households. This helped in identifying appropriate alternatives for water heating. The motivation behind doing this was to address multiple issues faced by the villagers with one solution. If implemented at scale, the bumbb can reduce the health hazard from the smoke generated by wood burning, drastically reduce the amount of wood needed for daily use, reduce the time spent in collecting fuelwood, arrest forest degradation, and above all, reduce the human-wildlife conflict that has been on the rise in the past decade.