The preceding sections tell many things about wood energy consumption in the countries under study. One of the most important that is common to all of these countries is that rural and urban woodfuel consumption have distinct patterns. Specifically, available data indicate or explain the following distinguishing characteristics between rural and urban fuelwood:

• Fuelwood consumption tend to be higher in rural areas, with more households in rural areas using fuelwood.

• Fuelwood tends to be the dominant fuel for rural household energy end use, particularly cooking. In urban areas, fuelwood competes with other fuels and might not play the dominant role.

• Cooking takes up a big portion of rural household end use energy consumption. In urban areas, other end use energy consumption can be significant.

• Household income determines fuelwood and total energy consumption to a large extent, but the pattern or degree of influence is distinct for rural and urban areas. For example, the shift to modern fuels with increasing income is more pronounced in urban areas.

The rural areas account for the bigger portion of total fuelwood consumption. In Pakistan, for example, the rural fuelwood consumption exceeded urban fuelwood consumption by a factor of more than five, equivalent to 84% of total fuelwood consumption. The Philippines has a slightly lower figure at 82%.

Corollarily, more households in rural areas are using fuelwood. In the Philippines, 86% of rural households was using fuelwood in combination with other fuels, particularly kerosene, while only 37% of urban households used fuelwood. In Cambodia, 95% of rural households rely on fuelwood, while 89% of households in urban areas outside Phnom Penh use fuelwood. In Phnom Penh, only 54% use fuelwood because many households use charcoal. In Pakistan and Maldives, the proportion of rural households using fuelwood is also more than 90%.

The only exception perhaps to this trend is Bangladesh. Data from Ramani et al. (1993) reveal that in Bangladesh fuelwood is actually slightly more important for urban than rural households. Urban households account for 57% of total household fuelwood consumption, while rural fuelwood, for 43%. The reason is that rural households in Bangladesh rely primarily on agriculture residues and animal dung, which account for 66% and 22%, respectively of total biomass consumption in rural households. Fuelwood, on the other hand, accounts for 65% of biomass consumption in urban households.

Fuelwood, therefore, tends to be the dominant fuel in rural areas and is primarily used for cooking. In the rural areas of both Pakistan and India, for example, fuelwood accounted for close to 60% of household energy use. Fuelwood certainly is the dominant fuel in rural Philippines, in which the share of fuelwood in household energy consumption nationwide was placed at nearly 70%. However, in the case of the Philippines and in terms of the number of households, this dominant role was shared with kerosene, as almost the same number of rural households were using kerosene and fuelwood. And there are other exceptions. It is already clear that this general is not the case for Bangladesh where agricultural residues took up more than 60% of household energy consumption. The same is true for China where fuelwood accounted for less than 35% of rural household energy consumption, while crop residues was responsible for more than 40%.

Table 3.19: Share of Fuels in Urban and Rural Household Energy by Income, India
(in percent)

The contrasting characteristics between rural and urban fuelwood consumption also determine how fuelwood supplies reach the final energy consumers. In rural areas, fuelwood is not usually a commodity that is traded as in urban areas. Available data show that in most cases, fuelwood in rural areas are collected freely from the local environment, while most, if not all, urban households buy fuelwood and charcoal from traders and retailers. However, there are indirect costs associated with acquisition and use of fuelwood in rural areas. These costs are linked to the accessibility of fuelwood sources. Rural households, in particular women and children, in many cases spend considerable time and travel great distances to collect fuelwood. In urban areas, woodfuels are commodities that compete with other fuels to satisfy household energy needs. Moreover, there is stronger tendency for urban fuel use to increase, diversify, and switch from fuelwood and charcoal to commercial fuels (for example, LPG and kerosene). Thus, fuel consumption patterns in urban areas may be changing more rapidly than in rural areas.

In this context, woodfuel flow is about rural/urban trading network existing in relation to woodfuel use in urban areas and the fuelwood collection practices in the rural areas. In both cases, information about the actors involved, in particular their socio-economic status, volume and types of woodfuel traded or collected, sources of fuelwood, are important. For urban fuelwood, information should include distribution, trading and pricing practices, including the prices of alternative fuels.

Information about rural/urban trading network are important because the associated activities constitute one major source of income particularly for the rural people, as fuelwood in urban areas come from rural areas. On the other hand, information on fuelwood collection practices in rural areas, coupled with a knowledge of fuelwood sources, address the issue of accessibility and the (indirect) costs associated with fuelwood collection. In urban areas, moreover, fuelwood prices are affected by distribution, trading and pricing practices.

Data from woodfuel flow studies confirm the fact that rural households in general collect fuelwood, while urban households buy them. Data for the Philippines, for example show that 85% of the fuelwood consumed in the rural areas, which account for 82% of total fuelwood consumption, are collected (Figure 3.5). At the same time, 53% of urban fuelwood consumption are purchased. The data available for Pakistan illustrate better the point. Here at least 84% of the urban households buy fuelwood, while at least 61% of the rural households collect fuelwood (Table 3.20). The same set of data for Pakistan show that income influence to a large extent whether fuelwood are collected or purchased. In both the rural and urban households, it is shown that as income increases the number of households buying fuelwood also increases, while those collecting fuelwood decreases. In Sri Lanka, 19% of the rich income class purchase fuelwood, while only 6% of the poor are able to do so (Figure 3.6). (In Sri Lanka, however, more households are collecting than buying fuelwood, regardless of income class.)

Figure 3.5

Figure 3.6

Table 3.20: Sources of Firewood for Urban and Rural Households by Income Class, Pakistan
(in percent)

Moreover, woodfuel flow studies provide information about opportunity cost associated with fuelwood collection. It is shown, for example, for Pakistan that this tends to be higher in rural areas because of the greater time and distance involved.

Woodfuel flow studies also reveal the main actors in the fuelwood supply and demand chain. The main agents in fuelwood collection, for instance, could vary with respect to land ownership. The data for Bangladesh show that women and children are the main actors involved in collecting fuelwood (see Figure 3.7). The extent of their involvement depend on the income class as indicated by land ownership. The landless class, therefore belonging to the lowest income level, employs more women and children, while the big farmer class, with presumably higher income, employs more hired labor in fuelwood collection.

Figure 3.7

Fuelwood is sourced from forest and agricultural lands. Table 3.21 shows the extent of forest and agricultural lands in the RWEDP member countries and indicate the varying resource endowments of the countries in the region. Both Bangladesh and Pakistan have less than 10% forest cover, but Bangladesh has 60% of its land area devoted to agriculture while Pakistan only has one-third of this. Both China and India, the largest countries in the region, have not as much forest cover as the rest of the countries in the region, but have sizeable agricultural lands (more than 50%). Of the remaining countries, only Philippines and Thailand have more than 40% agricultural lands, but their forest cover is less than 30%. Bhutan, Cambodia, Indonesia, Lao, Malaysia, and Myanmar have large forest areas, but have the smallest proportion of agricultural lands. Thus, it seems that there is an inverse relationship between the size of forest and agricultural lands, indicating, as it were, the competing land uses (e.g. in certain areas forests are "burned" to pave the way to farming).

Forests have been the traditional sources of firewood and wood for making charcoal. Indeed, there is some positive correlation between the share of fuelwood in total final consumption and the extent of forest lands. Countries with high fuelwood consumption in proportion to total energy consumption are also those that have high share of forest land areas. And at one time, fuelwood collection was blamed as the major cause of deforestation until further investigations have shown that changing land uses (i.e. conversion of forests into farm and grazing lands) has caused deforestation more than any other factors and that situations vary greatly from one area to another.

However, later studies also show that more and more fuelwood are being collected from non-forest lands. India, Pakistan, and the Philippines are three cases.

India. In 1978-79, as many rural households were collecting fuelwood from forests as from own farms. But, in a span of about 15 years, the proportion of households collecting fuelwood from forests decreased considerably, from 35% in 1978-79 to 17% in 1992-93, while that collecting from own farms increased to almost half of the total number of rural households. This decline in fuelwood collection from forests was mainly due, though, to the policy of the Indian government banning felling of trees from forests.

Table 3.21: Extent of Agricultural and Forest Lands in the RWEDP Member Countries

Pakistan. The HESS survey shows that 40% of sampled households in Pakistan collect fuelwood from private lands and another 32%, from own lands. Only 13% are collecting from state forest lands.

Table 3.22: Sources of Collected Firewood, Pakistan
(in percent)

Philippines. The HESS survey estimated that 85% of both urban and rural fuelwood came from trees outside the forests. For urban areas, only 30% of fuelwood supply came from forest areas.

The study concluded that at the national level the biomass resource in the Philippines "appears to be sustainable in the foreseeable future" as yield exceeded demand by a factor of three. However, the study has also identified certain areas which showed signs of pressure on the biomass resource and thus needed attention with respect to the ways biomass resources were managed and used.