From rainforest to charcoal | DW Documentary (2019)

Charcoal production takes a heavy toll on African forests. For instance in Mozambic, the economical drive is so intense that even valuable food trees providing monetary income such as the cashew trees (Anacardium occidentale) are harvested.

In 2019 an investigative journalism revealed that Europe has been burning American trees as biomass for power generation. Something similar is sinisterly happening in European charcoal market as the investigative journalism of Deutsche Welle finds out.

Europeans consume approximately 800,000 tons of charcoal for barbecuing on a yearly basis. Strikingly, upto seventy percent of the charcoal is imported into the EU. When the contents of the bags are examined by experts, it is found that they often contain a fraction of woods of tropical origin. Worldwide, transnational movement of tropical woods are tightly controlled. However in Europe, charcoal can go under the radar.

Nigeria and the DRC Congo are two of Europe’s main charcoal suppliers. Charcoal produced in Nigeria is mostly for export generating 7.4 billion US Dollars a year. During dry periods, charcoal production becomes an alternative income for Nigerian farmers. Family groups travel the countryside charring the trees they can cut down. In this way, Nigeria lost 36 percent of its forests between 1990 and 2005. At present, the remaining forest cover constitutes only twelve percent of the country. Charcoal production continues to destroy 350,000 hectares of woodlands annually.

Wood has been an ancestral form of fuel for more than a million year. Today, 2.7 billion people are dependent on wood or charcoal for cooking and heating globally. Yearly, 55 percent of harvested wood is used as fuel and the contribution to greenhouse gas emissions are massive. In fact, you can check out the visualization below where actively burning wildfires and active fires lit by humans are shown in red dots detected by NASA’s MODIS instrument aboard the Terra and Aqua satellites:

NASA Global Dust and Aerosol Simulation from Nature Documentaries on Vimeo.