Forest landscape project fights deforestation in Eastern Province

Depleted forest at Eastern Girls Secondary School where the school has been harvesting fuelwood

 By Innocent Daka

Smoke belches gently out into the sky from a makeshift kitchen where preparations of meals for pupils using firewood is underway at Magwero School of the blind in Chipata District.

The inside walls have become pitch-black, darkened with accumulated soot of many years.  Yet, in the midst of this smoke, choked but undaunted, the school-cook breaths hard while positioning logs of smoldering firewood under a big pot.

School head teacher Moses Mwale said the electrical pots at the school broke down in 2014 and the school now has switched to using firewood for cooking, which is also expensive and scarce.

Elsewhere at Eastern Girls Technical Secondary School, working in a smoky kitchen shelter to prepare three meals for 88 days each school term for about 370 pupils is also a daily ritual that another school-cook endures at the girls’ school.

According to the Head Teacher Lillian Kapili, the school opened seven years ago and uses firewood to cook because the electrical cooking pots, stoves and fryers in the modern kitchen are yet to be connected to electricity under the second phase of the project that has now stalled.

She admits that the use of firewood has led to the depletion of the school forest land.

“If you can check, we used to have a thicket all over. But because we are not using electric pots, we are using firewood for cooking, now we are running out of trees and we are scared that one day we will go without cooking because we will not have firewood,” Mrs Kapila said.

According to Mrs Kapili the school has recently stopped cutting any more trees to preserve the few that are remaining, resorting to buying firewood from local farmers, which is also proving costly.

“It hasn’t been easy, looking at our full enrolment of 378 pupils and the fees that they are paying, then you get part of that to pay for firewood and transportation, we are spending a lot. Actually transportation is higher than firewood itself, because firewood costs K160 and transportation is K200 per load we only use that to cook three meals,” She said.

According to Zambia Integrated Forest and landscape Project (ZIFLP) 2020 midterm report states that Eastern Province loses 50 hectares of forest cover daily and about 56,000 of that annually, an alarming rate of deforestation to which firewood and charcoal are major contributors. This means Eastern Province alone contributes over a quarter to the nationwide deforestation rate estimated at 250,000 hectares annually.

A baseline survey leading to the launch of ZIFLP in 2017 found 28 boarding schools, including Magwero School of the Blind and Eastern Girls Technical, as villains brewing a cocktail of factors that are depleting forests and increasing the carbon footprint that is putting the province’s climate landscape at peril.

And it is these schools, alongside a  myriad of villages like Chikowa in Mambwe District and Mathenga in Vubwi District, that have in the last few years become the focus of the integrated interventions aimed at slowing down deforestation.

Since the use of woodfuel cannot be stopped anytime soon, in the absence of universal access to green energy or hydropower, the Ministry of Energy is spearheading alternative interventions including the promotion of energy efficient cook stoves that use far less charcoal or just twigs other than the logs for firewood.

“It is not a hidden fact that most of the populations in Zambia still use wood-fuel for cooking. If anything, statistically it is pegged at 70 percent contribution to the national energy mix. Meaning, therefore, that we are harvesting our forests much more than how we should be allowing them to generate,” said Mrs Anna Banda-Chandipo, a Ministry of Energy focal point expert overseeing the energy component under the forest and landscape project.

To this effect ZIFLP, which is receiving support from the World Bank in partnership with BioCarbon Fund and Global Environments Facility, intends to distribute a total of 86,000 energy efficient cooking stoves before the project folds back.

In March this year the first batch of 1,400 domestic cook stoves, 100 in each of the 14 districts of the Eastern Province, were distributed while 28 schools got the industrial model of the energy saving cookers.

“What we are giving the communities are improved stoves for use at household level. We have two types of stoves we call Erasmus Stove… we also have a Pulumusa Stove. These stoves use less woodfuel, in most cases they use only twigs and just a bit of charcoal compared to the ordinary mbaula but they are still able to successfully complete the cooking process the way we like to do our cooking,” Ms Banda-Chandipo explained.

Other than distributing the Erasmus, Pulumusa and Industrial energy serving cooking stoves, the ZIFLP energy component has been training community members in Mathenga of Vubwi on how to mould fixed stoves using mud bricks.

At the core of the ZIFLP energy component is a multiplier effect theory of change, which the project actors want to see result in a number of impacts.

“Firstly, we would love to reduce the rate at which forests are being harvested. In that way we are allowing for natural regeneration of forests,” Mrs Banda-Chandipo said.

She also noted that apart from using less firewood and charcoal, the Erasmus and Pulumusa braziers are also designed to emit less smoke.

“What these improved cook stoves do is that they emit far less to zero pollutants. By virtue of reducing the amount of pollutants that are being emitted, we are reducing the risks of chest infections the communities or users of this wood-fuel are catching simply by inhaling the pollutants,” Mrs Banda-Chindapo said.

According to her, allowing the regeneration forests is expected to generally protect and improve the underground water profile in the country.

“By having a health recharge zone for water automatically we are going to have a lot more water in the entire system, unlike where we have an open land we don’t have sufficient water because almost all the water runs off, it doesn’t sip to go to the underground that we can use productively,” Ms Banda-Chindapo said.

She added: “Other than that, we are also permitting carbon sequestration to happen which in all improves the atmosphere and generally the profile of our forests.”

There are also real economic gains in monetary terms from reduced emissions into the atmosphere that can be converted into future currency, which could go a long way helping the funding situation as a country.

“When you take an overview glimpse of this project, just by not emitting so many pollutants we are achieving emission reductions. And we know very well that when we reduce the emissions that we are emitting into the atmosphere we stand a chance of to trade on a carbon market,” she said.

Eastern Girls head teacher Mrs Kapila was happy to receive the energy efficient cook stove, especially that it will reduce the school consumption of firewood.

“With this, it is going to be manageable. Being teachers we have been talking about conservation of trees, yet we are the ones in the forefront cutting them. With this, it will work well if we are talking about conserving trees because the cutting down is going to reduce,” Mrs Kapila said.

Inarguably, the benefits of the ZIFLP interventions abound. Mrs Banda-Chandipo is urging for more domestic and industrial users of firewood to start adopting less expensive, energy efficient cooking systems.

“So you notice that interventions like this really need to be promoted. We need to move from a space where we are cooking on three-stone-system, which is an open fire to a space where we are cooking on efficient stoves. These efficient cooking stoves direct all heat to the pot and there is no loss and if there is no loss it is minimal compared to the open cooking system,” Ms Banda explained.

IMD/Marketer/Feature Writer