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Sustainable bioenergy and forest landscape restoration (FLR) can be mutually beneficial.

FAO recently organized national dialogues in Togo and Ghana on sustainable wood energy, bioenergy alternatives and Forest Landscape Restoration, to guide policies and support the development of a joint agenda for action.

“Urgent steps need to be taken to modernize and formalize existing wood energy production pathways with a sustainable management approach”

Stated Professor David Oladokoun, Togo’s Minister of the Environment during the national dialogue in Togo that brought private sector producers and government officials together for the first time, to discuss possible solutions.

These dialogues that took place last month build on the successes of the Global Bioenergy Partnership project ‘Capacity building on the GBEP Sustainability Indicators for bioenergy in the Economic Community of West Africa States Countries,’ and led private stakeholders, forest farmers and scientists to call for a more participatory approach to ongoing processes that define national FLR strategies, the Wood Energy legal framework and Nationally Determined Contributions.

The dialogues also brought out the main barriers that prevent the market uptake of modern bioenergy pathways and the urgent need to develop specific governmental policies and measures to overcome them:

• Wider access to alternative sustainable modern bioenergy forms is key to diversifying energy sources and reducing wood consumption while supporting AFR100 and the FLR Initiatives.
• Financial or fiscal incentives need to be extended to alternative feedstock and/or alternative bioenergy technologies, such as improved biomass-fed cook stoves and/or micro gasifiers.
• Locally produced, efficient technologies should be used, for example, to make use of largely available organic waste and residues.
• A national market for improved feedstock such as pellets, should be supported with a view to making the best use of local natural resources.

The participants also highlighted the need to establish a permanent, national multi-stakeholder working group on Wood Energy and FLR.  

A reduction in wood supply is becoming more and more evident in several countries in Africa. Urgent measures to boost the plantation of trees are required to meet the increasing demand for timber and fuel. 

Unfortunately, in the reforestation race, the right tree species are not always planted, and the long-term sustainability of activities is often not considered. FAO considers that a joint agenda for action, integrating wood energy and FLR in a unique regulatory framework and foreseeing policies and measures that can favor synergies between these two sectors would be a positive move forward.

As Dr Tiziana Pirelli, FAO Technical Consultant stated “the unregulated demand for unsustainable wood energy results in illegal wood cutting, which is recognized as one of the main drivers of forest degradation in Sub-Saharan Africa. The action plan identified in these dialogues is fundamental for Togo and Ghana”.

Further to these national dialogues, FAO and GBEP will continue to explore opportunities to facilitate regular dialogues in Togo, Ghana and beyond.