| Round up from GBEP’s work on wood and water: new events from Activity Group 4 and 6
As reported in the previous issue of this newsletter, 2015 is the year when GBEP’s work will focus on links between bioenergy and wood and water, in the framework of two different Activity Groups of the GBEP Working Group on Capacity Building.
The Activity Group 4 "Towards sustainable modern wood energy development" (AG4), led by FAO, UNEP and UNF/GACC, and established in December 2013, focuses on sustainable production and use of wood energy for household energy access and productive local uses - primarily in developing countries. AG4 has presented at last November’s GBEP meetings the report “Towards sustainable modern wood energy development” conducted by ECO Consult and funded by the German Agency for International Cooperation (GIZ). The report highlighted, among the challenges related to the topic, those of data availability and accessibility, poor institutional settings existing particularly in developing countries, weak law enforcement capacities, low producer prices for raw materials, lack of solid land tenure regulation and often weak governance. Nonetheless, the report underlined that there exist rationales on economics in the sense that the majority of the people in the developing countries depend on wood energy. The report made several recommendations particularly on the need to producing policy reforms, including devolution of responsibility to rural communities, financing through cross taxation, better forest management and the introduction of efficiency measures in the production and utilization of wood-fuel.
Building on this work, the Activity Group has organized a webinar on 24 June to discuss the GBEP role to address the findings and policy recommendations spelled out in the report. Participants discussed about the main challenges to sustainably manage the wood energy sector in developing countries and shared stories of success in coping with these challenges including technological advancements in the conversion of wood into charcoal, regulatory frameworks, and tax systems. One of the main recommendations of the webinar was to focus on the necessary efforts for increasing the formalization of the wood energy sector in developing countries and on ways to contribute to building a positive image for small scale wood energy particularly in developing countries. In this sense, it was recognized the importance of exchanging success stories, in particular among neighbouring countries or countries with similar contexts, and it was agreed to further collect such stories and examples, so as to upload them on a dedicate section of the GBEP website. It was also proposed to organize an event in Africa, in the context of the GBEP activities, to facilitate the transfer of these experiences and their replication.
The Activity Group 6 “Bioenergy and Water”, established last November 2015 and led by IEA through IEA Bioenergy, has the mission of acting as a hub for information on bioenergy-water issues, including results from contributing researchers. It will co-ordinate transfer and exchange of relevant information between AG members and interested GBEP Partners and Observers. The Activity Group has recently carried out a call for positive examples and best practice experiences for bioenergy systems contributing to sustainable water management and will organize, next 25 and 26 August, a workshop on “Examples of Positive Bioenergy and Water Relationships” in Stockholm (Sweden), in collaboration with the Royal Swedish Academy of Agriculture and Forestry (KSLA) and Chalmers Energy Area of Advance. The seminar will make room for presenting experiences and examples from relevant international experts, e.g. outcomes of case studies presently being carried out, to illustrate and document how specific bioenergy feedstock systems deliver improvements to the state of water in different countries around the world.
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