However, in other regions, the authors say, much of the wood used for this traditional heating and cooking is actually the byproduct of deforestation driven by other factors, such as demand for agricultural land, which would have occurred anyway.“If forests and woodlands would have been cut down anyway, then the projects designed to reduce wood fuel demand are not actually going to reduce deforestation,” said Bailis, an associate professor at F&ES and lead author of the study. “Sure, you’re reducing wood use, but the underlying pressures driving deforestation are still out there.”The results stand in contrast to a long-held assumption that the harvesting of wood fuels — which accounts for more than half of the wood harvested worldwide — is a major driver of deforestation and climate change.Using a model originally developed by Drigo and Masera , and already applied in more than 20 countries, the researchers produce a spatially explicit snapshot of wood fuel supply and demand in 90 countries across the world’s tropical regions, where burning wood is a critical source of energy for cooking and heating.“One of the problems with traditional bio-energy is that the situation is very locally specific, so you can’t come up with a general response for all places,” said Masera. “One of the real strengths of this paper is that it demonstrates a methodology that allows you to identify priority regions for intervention”