After filling them up, her 10-year-old son, David Turay, stacks them on his head and sets off for the city centre to sell the charcoal. On average, David makes about 10,000 Leone per day (US$3) - money that his mother desperately needs to provide for him, his six-year-old brother and four-year-old sister.
Like many Salone women who lost their husbands during Sierra Leone’s 12-year civil war, Ms Sesay, 28, has struggled to adjust to her new role as family breadwinner. Selling charcoal is the only way she can put food on the table.
“I sell charcoal because I have no other way of supporting my family. There are no jobs here, so you have to create one yourself,” Ms Sesay says as she arranges the heaps of bags stacked outside the makeshift shelter that she uses as a shop and warehouse. “There is a ready market for it,” she adds, since “almost everybody uses charcoal for cooking”.
Reliance on charcoal and wood
In Sierra Leone, charcoal and wood make up 90 per cent of the total energy consumption. It is the preferred cooking and ironing fuel for both low and middle-income earners. For hundreds of thousands of rural dwellers, sales of firewood and charcoal provide virtually their only income, and allow a quick return on investments.
The use of charcoal and firewood however, is increasingly recognised globally as one of one of the major causes of deforestation and environmental degradation.
Making charcoal entails cutting down trees, thus causing deforestation. Wood has to be burnt in kilns for long periods of time, a process which releases CO2, the principal greenhouse gas that leads to global warming and climate change.
Between 1990 and 2000, Sierra Leone lost an average of 19,300 hectares of forest per year. This amounts to an average annual deforestation rate of 0.63 per cent. Between 2000 and 2005, deforestation increased by 7.3 per cent to 0.68 per cent per annum. In total, between 1990 and 2005, Sierra Leone lost 9.5 per cent of its forest cover, or around 290,000 hectares mainly as a result of shifting cultivation, commercial logging and cutting of trees for wood to make charcoal.
The annual supply of wood is currently estimated at around four million cubic metres, 10 per cent of which goes to Freetown. All around Sierra Leone’s capital, charcoal can be seen being sold in markets and by roadside vendors. The once leafy slopes around Freetown and its suburbs are bare of trees and vegetation. In their place are hundreds of houses, some newly built and others in different stages of completion.
Siray Timbo, Director of IDEAS, the largest Engineering and Construction firm in Sierra Leone, says the unregulated cutting down of trees and construction activity is an environmental time-bomb that could have serious consequences for its citizens.
Cutting down trees is destroying the soil cover by leaving the top soil unprotected and vulnerable to erosion during heavy rains, he notes.
“Last year we had a lot of flooding, and some people lost their lives because there is nothing anymore to stop the water from running down the hills. If nothing is done now, things could get worse,” he warns.
Environmental conservation initiatives
However, Syril Jusu, Director of Environment for the National Commission of Environment and Forestry, set up by an act of Parliament in 2007, says that there are some environmental initiatives that are beginning to bear some fruit.
Last year, Sierra Leone's government banned the exportation of timber in an effort to curb illegal logging by Chinese and other foreign businessmen. The ban is a move to prevent desertification as well as the loss of rare tree species that were being smuggled out of the country to meet demand from Asian woodcarvers.
Sierra Leone is also one of the first Commonwealth countries to set aside a forest for purely environmental conservation. The 75 hectare Gola forest, which borders Liberia, has been elevated to the status of a national park with local communities paid to compensate them for loss of income once generated from logging and diamond mining. The forest is home to leopards, chimpanzees and forest elephants, as well as 2,000 different plants and more than 250 species of bird, 14 of which are close to extinction.
The Gola project is being jointly funded by a US$12m trust fund set up by the European Commission, the French government, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and the United States-based Conservation International Aid agencies.
But far more important than its local environmental value, the Gola provides a model example of how poor countries could earn more from preserving trees than chopping them down. The Commonwealth is promoting a similar initiative – known as carbon financing - as a way of helping member states to reverse climate change.
Commonwealth ministers call for urgent action
Carbon financing is now seen as one of the most promising mechanisms for increasing investment in forestry and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. It could make it possible for countries to keep their forests, which would otherwise be cleared, in exchange for payment from industrialised countries looking to reduce their carbon emissions.
Last month, on 20 February, the Commonwealth Consultative Group on the Environment met in Monaco to discuss carbon financing. They agreed that it was important to take action now and not to wait for the international community to conclude their negotiations on climate change before beginning trials on new approaches.
Still, many experts contend that initiatives like carbon financing will have little impact without addressing the underlying problems of poverty and unemployment that face some of the poorer countries.
Sierra Leone for instance, is currently rated as the poorest country in the world, with about 70 per cent of its 5.6 million people still living on less than a dollar a day, and 70 per cent illiterate, according to the UN Human Development Index. An estimated two million youths, most of them former combatants, are unemployed.
With the country’s population expected to reach seven million by the year 2010, the use of wood and charcoal as main sources of household energy is likely to result in severe problems of availability if no attempts are made to ensure that the supply is sustainable, experts say.
“Efforts must be made to find alternative sources of energy like cooking gas, and people need to be educated and sensitised about why they need to switch to such fuels. Even more importantly, they need to be able to afford such fuels, so they need to be employed and have regular sources of income,” notes Dr Oguulade Davidson, an energy expert at the Fourah Bay College, University of Sierra Leone.
The advantage of switching to gas would be two-fold: it would reduce the use of charcoal and firewood in households; and it would also create a new industry of gas suppliers, one which could potentially provide employment for women like Sesay.
“It would be a win-win situation; you protect the environment while at the same time, creating jobs for people, which is really want people want,” says Dr Davidson.
Originally published in the Commonwealth Quarterly -http://www.thecommonwealth.org/EZInformation/176101/060308efforts/- on March 6, 2008.
There is a kind of bamboo that grows 2 feet per day. It's called iron bamboo and it makes very good quality charcoal. If made in a retort, the process is very clean. It can be done large scale or small scale.
ReplyDeleteYucabam.org is a company doing this in Mexico. I wonder how hard it might be to start such a social business in Sierra Leone?
Linda