From the New York Times:

Africa’s Charcoal Economy Is Cooking. The Trees Are Paying.

By NORIMITSU ONISHI JUNE 25, 2016 TOLIARA, Madagascar — When Julien Andrianiana started selling charcoal 14 years ago, he was just one of a few dealers around. Most households in Toliara, a coastal city in southwestern Madagascar, still used firewood for cooking. As the city’s population doubled, business became so brisk that he managed to send two of his children to college, “thanks to charcoal.” It quickly became the product of choice in kitchens not only in Toliara, but also in other fast-growing cities across Africa. Charcoal — cleaner and easier to use than firewood, cheaper and more readily available than gas or electricity — has become one of the biggest engines of Africa’s informal economy. But it has also become one of the greatest threats to its environment. In Madagascar, an island nation off the eastern African coast and one of the world’s richest nations in biodiversity,

Westerners used to care about biodiversity. But you seldom hear about it anymore. I wonder why.

the booming charcoal business is contributing to deforestation. It is expected to exacerbate the effects of climate change, which has already disrupted farming, fueled a migration to cities, and pushed many rural residents into the one thriving business left: charcoal. Sellers now appear on street corners throughout Toliara, hawking charcoal made from trees from the surrounding forests, an ecologically rich and fragile area with plants and animals found nowhere else. Throughout the day, their supplies are replenished by pickup trucks and convoys of ox-drawn carts. But acquiring high-quality charcoal made from hardwood trees has become increasingly difficult for dealers like Mr. Andrianiana, 44, as a third straight year of drought has pushed ever more people into the charcoal trade. He now wakes up at 3 a.m. and rides his bicycle an hour north to try to strike deals with charcoal producers before his competitors do. “Most of the trees have been cut down,” he said recently, hours after securing only 60 bags of charcoal, below his daily average of 80. “Within five years, all the trees will be gone.” Trees have been disappearing in a widening arc from Toliara in the past decade. As charcoal producers first culled trees in forests closest to Toliara, leaving villages surrounded only by thickets, the business has shifted to remote areas about 100 miles away, accessible by dirt roads and sometimes waterways. …

The population of Madagascar has more than doubled from 1990 to 2015, and the U.N. expect it to almost double over the next 25 years.

Africa’s charcoal production has doubled in the past two decades and now accounts for more than 60 percent of the world’s total, according to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization. Rapid urbanization across the continent has increased demand for charcoal; it has become the preferred way to cook in cities. as people have left rural areas where firewood, typically dead wood collected from the forest floor, is a largely sustainable source of energy for cooking. … As Africa’s population is expected to swell and urbanize at an even faster rate over the next decades, the continent’s demand for charcoal is likely to double or triple by 2050, according to the United Nations Environment Program. The charcoal business, along with the expanding use of land for farming, is expected to increase deforestation and worsen the effects of climate change on a continent poorly equipped to adapt to it.

Trees provide shade, which keeps the sun from evaporating water out of the soil as quickly. And the roots of the trees keep the soil from washing out to sea as fast.

Trees are good.

“It’s all interconnected, this long-term trajectory and the long-term effects on climate change,” said Henry Neufeldt, an expert on charcoal and climate change at the World Agroforestry Center in Nairobi, Kenya. “Just imagine transforming all that land into smoke, and not reforesting. In the next 30 years, a lot of forests and landscapes are going to be degraded because of charcoal demand, and because of the lack of policies to counter that effect.” … The village chief, Evomasy, 48, said he believed that the trees’ disappearance had caused the recent severe droughts. “We cut down everything,” he said, looking at the shrub land now surrounding his village. “We used to have trees all around us.”

The future of Africa is much like the present of Haiti, which has a population density of 384 per square mile, almost an order of magnitude higher than Madagascar. Haiti is more densely populated than every African country except Rwanda, which has highly fertile soil yet is still notorious for Malthusian culling with machetes.

Haiti has no sleeping sickness and relatively little Malaria, plus no large beasts such as elephants to compete with humans for food, so its population grew much faster than most of Africa’s. Haiti is notoriously deforested for charcoal needs, which leads to erosion of good topsoil. (A recent study concluded that while, sure, the parts of Haiti you see out your jetliner window while flying into the international airport look like a big field of mud, but, don’t forget, there are still forests in the remote parts of Haiti where there are no roads. So they’ve got that going for them.)

Most of Africa, fortunately, was not as densely populated as Haiti, although Nigeria is up to half of Haiti’s level.

But with the U.N. forecasting that the population of sub-Saharan Africa will octuple between 1990 and 2100, the future is going up in smoke.

In a generation, Africans are going to be asking why Westerners lost interest for about a generation in even mentioning to Africans that they ought to control their population.