Consuming Fuel and Fueling Consumption: Modeling Human Caloric Demands and Fuelwood Use

Abstract

This paper describes a conceptual framework that was developed to integrate livestock, human, cultivation and forest constraints to model community fuelwood consumption over a 25-year planning horizon. This framework was constructed as an energy balance based on human caloric requirements in order to examine the effects of household-level decisions for nutrition, fuelwood and land use. A scenario from a virtual community in Uganda is presented to illustrate the utility of this model to allow rapid policy and scenario evaluation. User-defined inputs combined with published research data are used in simulating resource responses and energy consumption rates. This model is a potential tool to monitor fuelwood consumption and to understand the implications of various land-use practices.

Department

Geography

Publication Date

3-1-2008

Journal Title

Small-scale Forestry

Publisher

Springer

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

10.1007/s11842-008-9037-3

Document Type

Article

Link to Full Text

Share

COinS