Why rural electrification won’t fix Zim deforestation

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Reliance on biomass such as fuelwood for energy in rural areas has a strong bearing on Zimbabwe’s environment.
Rural communities in Zimbabwe meet 94% of their cooking energy requirements by using traditional fuels, mainly fuelwood, and 20% of urban households use wood as the main cooking fuel.

For this reason, unsustainable fuelwood use patterns are driving deforestation.
Estimates are that deforestation has been high in the country, peaking at 330 000 hectares of forests destroyed between 2010 and 2014.

Policymakers attribute deforestation to human activities such as the clearing of land for agriculture, tobacco curing, infrastructure development and household use of wood because of electricity shortages.
The crux of the problem is that the policymakers believe that deforestation is a threat to the economy, while on the other hand, the ordinary citizens believe that environmental degradation is an outcome of the ongoing political and economic situation.

Policymakers, therefore, believe that deforestation can be addressed by increased electrification.
I conducted a study to look into the belief that the country’s environmental problems can be fixed by quick and technical policy solutions such as rural electrification.

The study sought to establish how the environment was embedded in the political economy.

I used the Buhera district in Manicaland province, south-eastern Zimbabwe as a case study.

I found there were various factors that forced people to use their environment in a way that degraded it. One participant captured it best: “Poverty has gotten into our woodlands. We no longer fetch wood to use in the kitchen only, but for burning bricks for sale …”

These are energy-intensive activities and usually require wet wood from indigenous trees such as mopane and acacia.
In local lingo, participants alluded to the practice of kukiya-kiya, or “making do” with short-term solutions under the circumstances.

From an environmental perspective, this phenomenon can be paralleled with “desperate ecocide”.

This line of thought argues that there’s a reciprocal link between poverty and environmental forces where poor people cause environmental degradation because of their poverty and desperation.

In turn, environmental degradation worsens their condition.

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