Urbanization, the energy ladder and forest transitions in India's emerging economy

By Ruth S. DeFries, D. Pandey. 2010

174 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Urbanization is currently a major force in tropical land use transitions as economic activities aggregate in urban centers, particularly in Asia. This paper examines relationships among urbanization, household energy source, and forest cover at the state level in India using available census, survey, and remote sensing analysis from the 1990s and 2000s. Central questions include (1) how rapidly are urban and rural households switching from traditional to modern fuel sources; and (2) what are the consequences of changing household energy sources for fuelwood demand and forest cover. Country-wide, 30 and 78% of urban and rural households respectively used fuelwood for cooking in 1993. In urban households, the percentage decreased to 22% by 2005 with a shift towards liquefied petroleum gas (LPG). The shift occurred across almost all income classes. In rural areas, the use of LPG increased fourfold but 75% of households still rely on fuelwood. Despite the decline in percentage households using traditional fuels, fuelwood demand continued to increase from 1993 to 2005 at a national scale due to an increasing total number of households. However, 25% of states and union territories experienced declines in rural fuelwood demand and over 70% declines in urban fuelwood demand. Forest cover has remained steady or increased slightly over the time period, reaffirming the conclusion that fuelwood demand may lead to local degradation but not large-scale deforestation. At the state level, increases in percent forest cover between 2000 and 2004 are positively associated with percent of total households that are urban (corresponding to fewer percentage households using wood) but not related to changes in fuelwood demand. Plantations are a primary cause of increases in forest area, where benefits to ecosystem services such as biodiversity and hydrologic function are controversial. Results suggest that households will continue to climb the energy ladder with future urbanization, resulting in substantial development benefits and reduced exposure to indoor air pollution. Implications of reduced fuelwood demand for forest cover are less certain but the limited data suggest that urbanization will promote a transition to increasing forest cover in the Indian context.

Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Pollution, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e526a5788a957b854bcdd5eb2c49f8dd78c848e7

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Citations in the corpus

Household cooking fuel choice and adoption of improved cookstoves in developing countries : a review (2014, background): “However, by examining relationships among urbanization, household energy source and forest cover in India, DeFries and Pandey (2010) find that fuelwood demand may lead to local degradation but not large-scale deforestation.”
Research, part of a Special Feature on A Framework for Analyzing, Comparing, and Diagnosing Social-Ecological Systems Applying the social-ecological system framework to the diagnosis of urban lake commons in Bangalore, India (2014, methodology): “Here, we provide an application of the SES framework to an urban context in India, a country experiencing particularly rapid urbanization in recent decades, with major impacts on ecosystems (DeFries and Pandey 2010, Nagendra et al. 2013).”
Who Adopts Improved Fuels and Cookstoves? A Systematic Review (2012, background): “Urban households were more likely to use cleaner fuels, whereas rural households were significantly less likely, as expected (DeFries and Pandey 2010).”
How feasible are global forest restoration commitments? (2020, background): “Improving community access to electricity alone could reduce rural poverty and forest degradation from charcoal harvesting, regardless of whether restoration commitments are met (Cook, 2011; DeFries & Pandey 2010).”