The potential of tree planting for sustainable village wood-energy production and consumption in developing countries: the case of Tanzania

Despite the size and number of indigenous forests have been decreasing and the demand for fuel wood in developing countries has been growing, tree-planting is not expanding considerably in such countries, including Tanzania. We argue that households' behaviour regarding tree planting depends on several economic and technological factors related to the interventions designed to stimulate tree planting practices, factors that need to be understood well. Morogoro and Coast regions in the eastern part of Tanzania are selected as case studies and data were gathered from 202 households in 11 villages, where tree planting programmes have been or still are active. This study first analyses the factors that influence households' tree-planting behaviour and the number of trees planted. The Heckman model was used to analyse the factors that drive households' tree-planting behaviour. The results indicate that households get wood-energy from forest reserves (57%) and own planted trees (9.1%). Empirical findings suggest that households' land size, their awareness of tree-planting programmes, tree planting for wood-energy, and the age of the household head have a positive and significant effect on households' tree-planting behaviour and its extent. Secondly, households' perceptions of tree planting for wood energy are examined and identified the factors that influence these perceptions. From this the analytical framework was designed that integrates households' perceptions in an economic policy instrument using the multinomial logit (MNL) and Heckman model. The results revealed that households' right/freedom to harvest tree products and transport them to the markets, their awareness of tree-planting programmes and planting trees for energy and trade are the factors most likely to favour tree planting for fuel wood. Thirdly, using data from a representative sample of 271 households, we examined what drives households to adopt improved cooking stoves (ICS) aimed at reducing fuel wood consumption. A discrete choice experiment (DCE) was used in offering ICS for sale to households in the study areas. Interestingly, we found that households distributed with or given just one type of IC'S were liquidity constrained and few adopted ICS (30%). On the other hand, the households that were supplied with more than one type of ICS largely adopted ICS (48%). In addition, ICS that uses both charcoal and firewood was purchased by many households (80%), which raised the total uptake of ICS to 48 %, providing empirical evidence of a shift from fire wood consumption to charcoal by rural households, because 80% of ICS that use both fuel types were highly purchased in the areas studied.