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Coverage

Mexico, National

Project time

2001 – 2002

Objectives/scope

1) Identify fuelwood (FW) hot spots in terms of residential FW use and availability of FW resources for the year 2000, and 2) estimate net CO2 emissions from the non-renewable use of FW

Institutional settings

National University of Mexico (UNAM) – FAO

Scale/resolution

The unit of analysis chosen was the Municipio (County) with 2,424 units. Approx. scale of input data: 1:250,000

Demand features

Input variables: 1) Fuelwood consumption, 2) Number of FW users, 3) Density of FW users, 4) Percentage of houses that use FW (i.e. saturation), 5) Percentage of people belonging to an ethnic group -as a FW consumption resilience indicator-, 6) Discrete growth of FW users between years 1990 and 2000

Supply features

Input variables: 1) Available FW supply by land cover class; to conduct this task the National Forest Inventory, with originally 64 land cover classes was simplified into 16 and linked to a comprehensive database of fuelwood productivity estimates by land cover type, climate and ecological region; and 2) Land use changes between years 1993 and 2000, which affects fuelwood production in the mid term where incorporated within the multi-criteria analysis.

Integration features

Municipio-level balance as the difference between FW supply and demand

Woodshed/bio-shed analysis

Not implemented

Integration with other aspects

A Geographic Multicriteria Analysis (GMCA) was applied to integrate weak-correlated supply and demand variables into a single adimensional index, which highlighted critical areas (fuelwood hot spots).

Findings/conclusions

The analysis allowed the identification of 304 high priority counties, which showed a spatially aggregated pattern into 16 clusters. HPC cover 4% of Mexican territory and represent 27% of total FW consumption. We estimated that between 1 to 3Tg of CO2 are released to the atmosphere by non-renewable FW burning, a value that represents less than 1% of Mexican total annual CO2 emissions in 2002.

Publications

Masera, O.R., A. Ghilardi, G. Guerrero, A. Velázquez, J.F. Mas, M.J. Ordóñez, R. Drigo, and M. Trossero, 2004. Fuelwood “hot spots” in Mexico: A case study using WISDOM. FAO Reports, Wood Energy Program, Forest Products Division, FAO, ROME, April, 89 pp.