When households run out of fuel: Responses of rural households to decreasing fuelwood availability, Ntcheu District, Malawi

Abstract

This paper examines strategies used by rural households in Central Malawi to cope with a decreasing fuelwood availability. With increasing distance to woodlands, households initially collected further away, spending more time on collection. But when distance to woodlands increased, households returned to nearby places using less time for collection and switching to lower quality wood. Results indicate that distance to collection place and collection time are not reliable indicators of fuelwood shortages as so often postulated in the literature. Households within the same village differed in collection strategies particularly as regards collection distance and collection frequency. Households that tended to collect further away and more frequently were large in size with more female adults. These households also collected more wood, even per capita, compared to smaller households, suggesting that smaller households economized on fuelwood use. This paper supports the idea that level of fuelwood used is not only determined by fuelwood availability, but the more by labor availability.