Greener charcoal

Planting fuelwood trees to save Madagascar's mangroves

By Blue Ventures

July 26^th, 2019

The school run in Ambanja town. Photo: Ben Honey

Madagascar’s mangroves are in trouble, and walking along the Route Nationale in the northwest town of Ambanja at sunrise, it’s easy to see why.

Local traders are emerging from their houses to set up their roadside stalls, ready for a new day. Purveyors of hot breakfast staples – tea, coffee, fried goods – prepare to serve the town’s early risers, who are already making their tortuous way along the rutted, puddle-strewn streets in their ox carts, bicycles, rickshaws, tuktuks and cars. School children laugh on their way to school, dodging the thickening traffic. The breeze, which at dawn was still laden with the nocturnal perfumes of ylang ylang and frangipani, now carries the scents of fresh coffee, fried breadfruit and – in particular – acrid charcoal smoke rising from the traders’ stoves.

For in Ambanja, as in the rest of the island, the vast majority of people cook their meals using charcoal or firewood – fuels that are far more widely available and affordable than gas or electricity.

Cut and degraded mangrove forest near Ampampana village, Ambanja

Affordability is a key concern for Malagasy people, since over 70% of the population live below the international poverty line, earning less than $1.90 per day. But wood and charcoal come with important downsides for both human and environmental health. While simple changes are being made to reduce the impacts on people (such as using more efficient stoves and cooking in well-ventilated spaces to reduce exposure to smoke), reducing the impact on the environment remains a significant challenge.

The east of Madagascar is blessed with pine and eucalyptus plantations that supply a large proportion of their cooking fuel needs. The western regions are not so lucky, and rely far more heavily on wood harvested from the island’s rapidly dwindling – but priceless – native forests. In coastal areas like Ambanja, cooking fuel is sourced largely from mangrove forests, as the timber from several mangrove tree species is prized for the production of high quality firewood and charcoal.

Cooking a meal using mangrove firewood, in an enclosure made of poles cut from the red mangrove tree (Rhizophora mucronata). Photo: Garth Cripps

However, coastal communities recognise that clearing mangrove trees for fuelwood is not in their long-term interests. They value mangroves as a vast source of natural wealth that underpins their livelihoods and wellbeing.

These forests provide nursery grounds for many of the animals on which local communities rely, from crabs and shrimp to fish and fowl. Mangrove trees yield termite resistant construction wood, medicinal plants, tannin for preserving leather, and a source of nectar for honeybees. They also protect the coastline from storms and erosion, and help to regulate global climate by absorbing atmospheric carbon and storing it in the trees and the dark mud beneath their roots.

Mature mangrove trees flooded at high tide, near Ankazomborona in the Ambanja region.

Mangrove trees are partially submerged during high tides

The endangered Madagascar fish eagle occurs only in Madagascar, and often nests in mangrove forests

Mangroves provide breeding grounds for fish, supporting important marine fisheries

The Madagascar malachite kingfisher is a common sight in mangrove forests

Mud crabs are an important source of food and income for coastal communities. Photo: Garth Cripps

Most coastal communities in western Madagascar rely heavily on fishing as a source of protein and income

As part of Blue Ventures' holistic approach to mangrove conservation through our Blue Forests programme, funded by the UK Government International Climate Finance (ICF), we are working with local communities in the Ambanja region to develop sustainable forest management practices.

Through a combination of fuelwood plantations, better forest resource use, mangrove reforestation and the development of alternative livelihoods, communities are working to maintain healthy productive mangroves, and ensure forest carbon stores remain locked away.

Providing a viable alternative to mangrove charcoal is one of the major goals of this programme, and a critical one if efforts to reduce degradation of native forests are to succeed. The key is to find a miracle tree that will thrive in the Ambanja region’s degraded soils, tolerate climatic extremes, grow rapidly and yield high quality timber for firewood and charcoal production.

A brown salwood (Acacia mangium) sapling

As unlikely as it may seem, such a tree appears to exist. The brown salwood (Acacia mangium) – a fast-growing hardwood tree from Australia – seems to offer all these qualities and more. In just five years, this remarkable tree can reach 10–15 metres tall and a diameter at chest height of up to 26 centimetres.

In other words, it grows faster and produces a lot more wood than mangroves do. In ten years these plantations can yield 44 cubic metres of wood per hectare, helping to ensure that Ambanja’s precious mangrove forests remain intact.

For the last five years, Blue Ventures has been working with four villages to develop fuelwood-growing initiatives. Beyond the initial provision of training and support for community members to set up brown salwood nurseries, our key role has involved helping local landowners to obtain the necessary land tenure rights to establish fuelwood plantation businesses. This is a vital step that ensures landowners have the confidence to commit to investing in a fuelwood crop that will take around five years to mature.

One of the pioneering growers, standing in front of a two-year old brown salwood tree in his plantation

Since 2014, the community fuelwood growers have planted around 72,000 brown salwood trees over 70 hectares, with a further 50 hectares planned by the end of 2020. The individual plantations are small, and are established on abandoned farmland; originally cleared by traditional shifting cultivation methods to grow crops, such land rapidly loses fertility and after just four years it is no longer productive, reverting to rough grazing for zebu cattle.

The first growers have shown that brown salwood can thrive even on this exhausted land. In another few years they should be able to make a reliable income from the timber, to supplement what they earn from fishing or farming.

Brown salwood tree nursery in Andilamboay

Now that the brown salwood plantations are growing well and the growers are familiar with the sowing and transplanting process, Blue Ventures will help them to diversify the plantations with other tree species. This will provide growers with additional income from a wider range of tree crops, and lead to ecologically healthier plantations with higher environmental and biodiversity benefits. Growers are particularly interested in fruit and nut trees, including lemon, orange, and cashew, which will produce a crop every year.

In the near future, the morning breeze on the streets of Ambanja will carry the scents of charcoal smoke made not from virgin mangrove forests, but from the wood of the amazing brown salwood tree.