BY TSEGAYE NEGA & DEBORAH GROSS
(Professors, Environmental Studies and Chemistry, Carleton College, Minnesota, USA)
The majority of Ethiopians depend on forest and related resources for their energy needs. Thus, the “Green Legacy,” initiated by the Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, is an important and commendable effort on many levels. The aim of this initiative is to tackle environmental degradation and climate change on a broader scale while also seeking to use the initiative as means to “see beyond” the immediate and numerous challenges Ethiopia faces.
The billions of trees that will be planted are not only an ecological resource crucial to shaping a sustainable future, but an economic one that serves as an energy source. As these trees grow, they will absorb carbon dioxide from the air and create oxygen, while providing us with life, food, water, shelter, fiber and soil.
The reality, however, is that there is more to forestry initiatives than just planting trees. A newly planted tree is like a child with huge potential. Trees need time to develop and mature before they can serve as a valuable biological and economic resource. This takes decades of time-consuming and expensive care, which includes, among other things, long-term monitoring systems that ensure the forests survive in the face of threats such as illegal harvesting, pests, diseases, drought, and wildfires. In practice, few (if any) forestry initiatives include nurturing the trees after planting. As a result, the probability of planted trees growing into mature forests is low and the expected benefits are unlikely to happen as planned.
This is even more serious when juxtaposed with the rate at which the country is losing its mature forests for fuel wood, agriculture, and more. Mature forests are strong enough to withstand natural disasters and other stresses and have a major influence on rainfall patterns, flood prevention, and water and soil quality. Mature forests provide critical resources like food and medicine to local communities and are home to irreplaceable biodiversity as well as endangered species. Although older trees don’t absorb carbon as fast as younger ones, they represent the majority of an ecosystem’s carbon sink, holding massive amounts of carbon in their trunk, branches, leaves, and roots.
The negative effect of deforestation in a mature forest is immediate and much larger than the potential benefits that can be gained from efforts to regrow it. In order to put the “Green Legacy” initiative on firmer ground, it is imperative that it be complemented by conserving existing forests. Due to the Prime Minister’s personal commitment to implementing successful programs like the “Green Legacy’’ project, the conservation of existing forests must also be directed from the offices of the Prime Minister.
How can we preserve existing mature forests if local communities rely on them not just to accumulate material wealth, but also to put food on the table? The answer to this question requires understanding one of the major causes of deforestation in the country: the use of solid fuel for cooking and heating. Over 90% of the Ethiopian population cooks and heats by burning solid fuels (i.e., wood, charcoal, cow-dung cake, and crop residues) in traditional cookstoves and/or open fires. Cooking injera alone consumes 50 million cubic meters of wood every year.
To supply the 500,000-plus tons of charcoal needed in urban areas (mostly Addis Ababa) alone, ~29,000 hectares, more than the combined areas of Bole, Akaki, Addis Ketema, Arada, and Gulele sub-cities of Addis Ababa, are cleared every year. Moreover, projected demand for wood was around 120 million cubic meters in 2020, while supply from all sources was only 40 million cubic meters, only one-third of the demand.
As wood has become increasingly scarce, the number of households using dung-cakes and crop residues as fuel sources has increased. The diversion of these fertilizers into household fuel has led to significant crop-yield reduction. In sum, the demand and intensity of energy derived from solid biomass not only far outstrips the regenerative capacity of forests and other biomass sources, it will undermine the country’s economic development and is highly likely to increase its vulnerability to climate change. The health toll of traditional cooking methods is also tremendous. Having an open fire in a kitchen is like burning 400 cigarettes per hour. As such, according to the World Health Organization, more than 60,000 people, mostly women and children, die every year in Ethiopia because of indoor air pollution and another 6 million suffer from respiratory diseases.
Cooking and heating should neither kill nor harm, nor should it lead to environmental degradation, and this vision is achievable because solid biomass fuels can be used cleanly in improved gasifier cookstoves. A gasifier cookstove powered by wood-gas from dry biomass can reduce the health and environmental impacts associated with open fires and has great potential to complement the “Green Legacy” initiative. We have established a social benefit manufacturing company in Addis Ababa to do exactly that:Anega Energies Manufacturing (https://anegaenergiesmanufacturing.org/).
Over the last eight years, we have developed clean and highly efficient biomass-based cooking systems specifically tailored to the cooking habits common in Ethiopia. This process has focused on three important components: (a) designing and manufacturing clean cookstoves, (b) developing and manufacturing an energy dense and uniform biomass-based fuel with low moisture content (fuel pellets), and (c) improving the stove design to maximize the heat transfer from the fire to the cooking pot.
Our cooking system can be seen as more accessible but comparable to LPG (gas) stoves, providing similar social and environmental benefits at a fraction of the cost. According to a recent study, the Household Air Pollution (HAP) risk index of using LPG and a gasifier cookstove with fuel pellets (a version of our system) is almost identical, 1.2 versus 1.3, meaning both systems drastically reduce the health hazard associated with using solid fuels, which amounts to the reduction of HAP up to 97% compared to traditional wood and charcoal cookstoves. .
When comparing LPG with firewood, studies have found that switching from firewood to LPG decreased the per capita consumption of fuelwood by 90%. In Ethiopia, per capita fuelwood consumption is around 700 kg/year. Since average household size is around 4.6, fuelwood consumption per household is around 3.2 tonnes/year. This means that switching just 100 households to LPG is equal to saving 320 tonnes of fuelwood.
The available literature suggests that 320 tonnes of firewood roughly translates to 1.5 hectares of forest. Since approximately 80% of the country’s population (~20 million households) currently uses traditional artisanal cookstoves, if 1% of households (200,000) currently using fuelwood switch to our cooking system, 3,000 hectares of forest would be saved from deforestation every year.
This number grows if we consider instead urban residents who predominantly use charcoal. Almost all charcoal is made using earth mound kilns where the wood-to-charcoal conversion ratio is approximately 10:1. Accordingly, if the 200,000 households are urban residents, switching these households to our cooking system will save ten times this amount! The advantages of our cooking system are not limited to forest preservation. At the household level, exclusively using our cookstove can help each family cut cooking time by 50% and reduce fuel cost by 65%. These stoves are more efficient in terms of greenhouse gas emissions as well. Our cookstove avoids the emissions of 6 tonnes of CO2e per year per cookstove.
That means that if 10% of Ethiopian households make the switch, the total amount of CO2e avoided would come to 1.2 million tonnes. According to a recent study conducted in the United States, eliminating 1 million tonnes of CO2 is equivalent to removing more than 40 million LPG cylinders, taking 214,133 passenger vehicles off the road, or dedicating 3419 hectares of forest to sequestering carbon. No wonder Ethiopia has the third largest projected impact (after China and India) from switching to clean cooking, based on reduction in global surface temperature by 2050.
Moreover, the by-product of burning the fuel pellets in our cookstove is not ash, a waste product, but charcoal. For every kilogram of fuel pellets burned, the user can harvest up to 0.25 kg of charcoal. In other words, these cookstoves aren’t just cooking tools, but also highly efficient charcoal kilns. While families can burn the charcoal, we encourage them to exchange it with us for fuel pellets to help reduce fuel costs. We then convert the charcoal exchanged into three distinct additional products: water filters, air filters, and bio-based fertilizers.
These additional products, in turn, have social, economic, and environmental benefits. One of the most important problems in agriculture, especially in horticultural fields that use irrigation, is nitrogen (in the form of nitrate) leaving soil and entering waterways via leaching. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that up to 30% of nitrogen fertilizer leaches from soil as nitrate. Applying our bio-based fertilizer reduces this leaching by 70% or more.
The initial fuel pellets are sustainably sourced as well, compounding the benefits to existing forests. We make our fuel pellets from waste biomass such as spent coffee grounds, coffee husks, khat stems, sawdust, wood chips, and other agricultural byproducts, which currently have little to no use. Assuming that each household consumes 2 kg of fuel pellets per day, making fuel pellets from waste biomass to meet the needs of the 200,000 families is approximately equal to recycling 500,000 tons of waste biomass every year.
Upcycling this amount of waste biomass to fuel pellets not only makes cities cleaner, but also creates thousands of jobs. For example, Addis Ababa has 328 Kebeles . Assuming each kebele has at least 10 restaurants/coffee shops/hotels, the collection and processing of these waste streams from these sources will generate at least 5 opportunities for local workers in each Kebele, which translates into more than 1500 jobs.
Putting the “Green Legacy” initiative on firmer ground largely depends on our actions now to confront the health, environmental and climate crisis by protecting the forests that we have. We can do this by enacting effective policies to transition to clean cookstoves and improved fuel. By making this switch, we will also create thousands of new jobs, save Ethiopian households money on their cooking-fuel costs, and protect lives by improving the air Ethiopians breathe in their homes, workplaces, and even when they are out and about.
To get there, we need to get started today. This requires four things. First, it is important to strengthen MOWIE to have a robust cookstove testing facility and to develop cookstove and fuel standards that provide guidance and support to private entrepreneurs. Second, we need to bring down the upfront costs of clean cookstoves through rebates, incentives, and low-cost financing to encourage consumers (especially the poor) to buy them.
Third, we need to help organize and streamline the highly fragmented set of agencies responsible for the household energy sector which makes obtaining space to build factories, and navigating the tax and customs regulations, nearly impossible for businesses like Anega Energies Manufacturing. Last, like the” Green Legacy” initiative, this effort needs to be coordinated from the PM’s office so that a consistent vision for improving the health of the Ethiopian forests can be maintained.
The history of Anega Energies Manufacturing is a perfect example to illustrate this. We finalized our product offerings in 2018 and the MiNT graciously provided us with space in which to operate our 30 million ETB worth of imported manufacturing equipment. Although it took nearly a year to get power installed, and we are still facing challenges related to importing raw materials and using foreign funds that we have received from international organizations, we look forward to offering these transformative cookstoves to Addis Ababa as soon as possible. However, this goal is up in the air right now, as we have been told to vacate the premises by August 2021, complicating our efforts to be part of the “Green Legacy” in Ethiopia. Nevertheless, we hope that with the active support we are currently getting from a number of Ethiopian government organizations (i.e., MiNT, the Ethiopian Embassy in the US, the Ethiopian Diaspora Agency, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs) will help us address the challenges mentioned and and move forward with our project.
The Ethiopian Herald June 16/2021
