FAO in close cooperation with other working groups is responsible for the implementation of activities related to wood energy planning and policy development. The overarching aim is to strengthen the national wood energy planning capabilities of forestry services and energy agencies through the development and dissemination of information, methodologies, tools and techniques for the adoption of enhanced national wood energy statistics that would support effective and sound wood energy policies and programs.
To meet its objectives, FAO is involved in the production and analysis of wood energy data on a scale ranging from local to global. The following list highlights the activities most relevant for this report:
- Conceptual definition of the Interactive Wood Energy Statistics (i-WESTAT).
- Conceptual design of the Unified Bioenergy Terminology (UBET) [5] and fostering interagency discussion on terms and definitions.
- Regional Studies on wood energy statistics produced in the series Wood Energy Today for Tomorrow (WETT). The studies were conducted in the period 1997 – 2000 and covered all regions of the world [1] [2][3] [4] [6].
- Commission and analysis of country studies thematically focused on wood energy statistics, an activity that was carried out in the framework of the FAO/EC Partnership Programme on Sustainable Forest Management (2000-2002).
- Field projects and pilot studies (Mexico, Cuba, Ghana, Slovenia, Benin, Senegal, just to mention few recent ones).
- Conceptual development and implementation of the Woodfuel Integrated Supply/ Demand Overview Mapping (WISDOM) methodology.
- Preparation and dissemination of Woodfuel Surveys Guidelines
- Version 1 of the interactive Wood Energy Statistics (i-WESTAT 1).
This last activity was undertaken to create a user-friendly interactive query system to provide up-to-date woodfuel and wood energy statistics by forestry, energy, environment and natural resource management professionals. It illustrated the fact that because most of the existing information on woodfuels was estimated rather than measured the accuracy and reliability of the information varied from country to country. The first version of i-WESTAT was developed by collating the statistics from the regional WETT studies. Since then, most international sources have reviewed their time series and several other sources became available, hence the need for an updated version of i-WESTAT.
The scope of the present activity (i-WESTAT Version 2) was to collect, harmonize and insert in i-WESTAT most up-to-date information on wood energy from international agencies, country reports and other accessible sources, with additional emphasis to original references, estimation methods, and any other information useful to the qualification of each individual value in the database.
