(2017-03) Energy Forests: Planting Charcoal

Charcoal is Haiti's dominant household fuel and the principal proximate driver of deforestation, and the framing here, planting charcoal, is the response: if the demand cannot be displaced quickly, the supply can be grown deliberately on dedicated stands rather than taken from residual forest. ORE presents this as a tested rather than novel proposition, tracing it through three programme periods, PST from 1987 to 1992, PDR from 2000 to 2002, and CSI/MGS from 2011 to 2017, which is thirty years of intermittent implementation. That history is the argument's strength and its problem at once: the technique has been demonstrated repeatedly and has not displaced the extractive supply chain, which points at economics and land tenure rather than agronomy. Presented alongside ORE's assessment of tree damage from Matthew.