The patterns of woodfuel production and demand, and their associated social, economic and environmental impacts, are site specific. Broad generalizations about the woodfuel situation and impacts across regions, or even within the same country, have often resulted in misleading conclusions, poor planning and ineffective implementation.
In this paper, it is argued that adequately assessing the implications of the current patterns of woodfuel production and use and the sustainable potentials of woodfuel resources, particularly within developing countries, requires a holistic view and a better knowledge of the spatial patterns of woodfuel supply and demand. There is a need to conduct multi-scale spatially-explicit analyses of woodfuel supply and demand that are able to articulate the local heterogeneity into the regional and national levels. Studies that provide full-country coverage and are based on a consistent integration of data at lower geographical scales are critically lacking. These studies should be based on a spatial representation of woodfuel use and production patterns in order to identify priority areas and “hot spots” for intervention.
This paper introduces Woodfuel Integrated Supply/Demand Overview Mapping (WISDOM), a spatially-explicit method for highlighting and determining woodfuel priority areas or “woodfuel hot spots”. WISDOM is oriented to support strategic planning and policy formulation, through the integration and analysis of existing demand and supply related information and indicators. Rather than absolute and quantitative data, WISDOM is meant to provide relative/qualitative values such as risk zoning or criticality ranking, highlighting, at the highest possible spatial detail, the areas deserving urgent attention and, if needed, additional data collection. In other words, WISDOM should serve as an ASSESSING and STRATEGIC PLANNING tool to identify priority places for action.
WISDOM is based on: a) the use of geo-referenced socio-demographic and natural resource databases integrated within a geographical information system framework; b) a minimum spatial unit of analysis at sub-national level; c) a modular, open, and adaptable framework which integrates information of relevance to wood energy from multiple sources; and d) a comprehensive coverage of woodfuel resources and demand from different energy users.
WISDOM provides several benefits: a) it allows a consistent and holistic vision of the wood energy sector over the entire country or region and helps to determine priority areas for intervention; b) it allows the definition of critical data gaps resulting from the thorough review and harmonization of wood energy data; c) it promotes cooperation and synergies among stakeholders and institutions (such as those from forestry, agriculture, energy, and rural development). In this, WISDOM will combat the fragmentation (of information, of responsibility) that so heavily limits the development of the sector; and d) it allows the actions to be concentrated on circumscribed targets and thus to optimize the use of available resources (human, institutional, financial, and others).
In this report, the WISDOM approach is illustrated with a case study on the identification of household fuelwood “hot spot” municipalities in Mexico. The case study integrates spatial information from detailed local surveys on fuelwood consumption and their associated impacts, socio-demographic historical series from the National Census Bureau and land-use land-cover statistics from the latest Mexican National Forest Inventory. The analysis helps to identify the 273 municipalities (out of a country total of 2,435 units) where action is most urgently needed.