Coping with Fuelwood Scarcity: Household Responses in Rural Ethiopia

Abebe Damte, Steven Koch and Alemu Mekonnen

RFF Working Paper Series from Resources for the Future

Abstract: This study uses survey data from randomly selected rural households in Ethiopia to examine the coping mechanisms employed by rural households to deal with fuelwood scarcity. The determinants of collecting other biomass energy sources were also examined. The results of the empirical analysis show that rural households in forest-degraded areas respond to fuelwood shortages by increasing their labor input for fuelwood collection. However, for households in high forest cover regions, forest stock and forest access may be more important factors than scarcity of fuelwood in determining household’s labor input to collect it. The study also finds that there is limited evidence of substitution between fuelwood and dung, or fuelwood and crop residue. Therefore, supply-side strategies alone may not be effective in addressing the problem of forest degradation and biodiversity loss. Any policy on natural resource management, especially related to rural energy, should distinguish regions with different levels of forest degradation.

Keywords: fuelwood; labor allocation; biomass; rural Ethiopia (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q12 Q21 Q42 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012-01-27
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-afr, nep-agr, nep-ene and nep-env
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

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Related works:
Working Paper: Coping with Fuel Wood Scarcity: Household Responses in Rural Ethiopia (2011)
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