Sustaining a Cleaner Environment by Curbing Down Biomass Energy Consumption

Abstract

AbstractEnvironmental degradation, soil erosion, and desertification are some of the consequences of high rate of traditional biomass fuel use by households in developing countries. The critical issues to raise here are how can these households be encouraged to change their energy consumption behavior? What are the factors that cause the rampant use of biomass fuel in developing countries? How and to what extent can these factors be manipulated so that households in developing countries are encouraged to adopt clean energy fuel an alternative to the most widely used biomass fuel? Therefore, this chapter tries to find answer to the above questions raised, by carrying out an in depth analysis of households’ use of biomass fuel in developing countries using Bauchi State, Nigeria, as the case study. Cluster area sampling technique was utilized to generate the various responses, where a total number of 539 respondents were analyzed. The study estimated ordered logit model to analyze the factors that influence the movement of households along the energy ladder from nonclean energy to the cleaner energy. Furthermore, Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) model was estimated to analyze the impacts of socio-economic, residential, and environmental factors on biomass energy consumption. It was found that age of the household head and his level of education, income, living in urban areas, home ownership, and hours of electricity supply have positive and significant impact on household energy switching from traditional biomass energy use to the cleaner energy. Therefore, policies that will enhance household income and the increase in the availability of cheap cleaner energy will encourage households switching to cleaner energy sources thereby reducing the level of environmental pollution in the study area.