Bioenergy in West Africa: Impacts on Women and Forests

The September 2019 Forest Cover newsletter from the Global Forest Coalition focuses on the bioenergy developments and use in West Africa and how they are impacting women and forests. From bioenergy produced in large-scale, requiring huge areas of land to provide the raw materials, to the ubiquitous household and community-scale energy needs, where wood is collected mainly by women. Clean cookstove projects are increasingly being tied to commercial tree plantations that produce “clean charcoal”, and eucalyptus trees are being planted on a large-scale purely to burn in a power station. Women must spend long hours and undertake physical effort to gather fuelwood, which is made worse by deforestation, besides the health impacts due to exposure to smoke.
Read the newsletter in English here.