The Citizen Daily
Tanzania’s entire forest cover will disappear in about 10 to 16 decades if the current high level of deforestation is not checked, a new survey warns.
While the survey by Conservation International, a non-profit organisation with its headquarters in Washington, DC, United States, has revealed that 2,300 square kilometres of forests is being destroyed yearly, the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) has put the annual deforestation rate at whopping 4,200 square kilometres. (Read more.)
First the FT mentioned it.
We blogged about it in December.
Then CNN’s Anderson Cooper did a piece.
Now it’s the BBC’s turn to take a whack a it, albeit with a twist.
Whatever the case, I always learn something new from this story.
In this case, it’s the alarming statistic that 90 percent of the women who travel to the forest for fuel reported been harassed, raped, or experienced violence while collecting woodfuel.
Addressing today the newly minted Energy and Climate Partnership of the Americas (ECPA), Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced a series of promising initiatives.
Not surprisingly, the one that really grabbed our attention was the following:
Advancing Sustainable Biomass Energy: The U.S. Department of State and U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) are inviting interested countries to collaborate on scientific exchanges to advance renewable biomass energy that is sustainable. The initiative aims to generate and share information that can be applied by participating ECPA countries for expanding production and usage of renewable biomass for energy and reducing greenhouse gas emissions while minimizing impacts on natural resources. USDA will serve as the U.S. technical lead agency and will coordinate U.S. government technical assistance to partners in the region.
ECPA is comprised of voluntary initiatives focused on energy efficiency, renewable energy, cleaner fossil fuels, infrastructure, and energy poverty.
Further information is available at: www.ECPAmericas.org.
Call it a stove in every pot. Make that two stoves in every pot.
That’s because Peru could have bought every rural poor two energy efficient stoves in 2007 for the equivalent of what Indoor Air Pollution cost the country.
As we discussed last week, The Charcoal Project is leading a research on a global analysis that would put a price tag on the inefficient domestic combustion of biomass as practiced today in the vast majority of the developing world.
Our friends at the World Bank were kind enough to point us to their Country Environmental Analysis (CEAs) reports on their website.
We randomly selected the 2007 assessment for Peru. The dense 300+ page document does contain however some very valuable information, including this eye-popping table below:
Here’s the fine print to satisfy your inner development geek:
3.39 Total annual cost of indoor air pollution is estimated at 0.55-1.0 billion soles, with a mean estimate of 0.78 billion (Table 3.22). The cost of mortality for adults is based on the value of statistical life (VSL) as a high bound and HCA as a low bound, and on the human capital approach (HCA) for children. The cost of morbidity includes the cost of illness (medical treatment, and value of lost time for adults) and DALYs from morbidity valued at GDP per capita to reflect the cost of reduced well-being associated with illness. The value of time for adults is 75 percent of urban and rural average hourly wages, which are 3.8 SI. and 2.5 SI. respectively.
3.40 There is very little information about the frequency of doctor visits, emergency visits and hospitalization for COPD patients in any country in the world. Schulman et al. (2001) and Niederman et al. (1999) provide some information on this from the United States and Europe. Figures derived from these studies are applied to Peru in this chapter. Estimated lost work days per year is based on frequency of estimated medical treatment plus an additional 7 days for each hospitalization and one extra day for each doctor and emergency visit. These days were added to reflect time needed for recovery from illness.
3.41 To estimate the cost of a new case of COPD, the medical cost and value of time losses have been discounted over a 20-year duration of illness. An annual real increase of 2 percent in medical cost and value of time has been applied to reflect an average expected increase in annual labor productivity and real wages. The costs were discounted at 3 percent per year, a rate commonly applied by WHO for health effects.
A conversion shows that the high end cost of IAP (rounded to 1 billion Peruvian soles) in the table above is equivalent to 321,123,160 in 2007 US Dollar
Add to this sum the cost of labor lost, deterioration of environmental services, and CO2 emissions and I bet the amount is closer to 500,000 million USD.
This figure is purely speculative but we hope our pending global review will shed more light on the actual cost.
Oh, in case you were wondering, U$321,123,160 will buy you about 16 million rocket stoves at $20 a pop.
There were about six million rural poor in Peru in 2007.
