THE OPEC FUND AND AN AMBITIOUS, YET
Active development work means finding a balance between seemingly conflicting needs. For this all hands on deck are needed By Axel Reiserer, OPEC Fund W hen OPEC Fund Director-General Dr. Abdulhamid Alkhalifa visited Madagascar last year, he woke up one morning in the capital Antananarivo and what he smelled was not the coffee. “From everywhere came the strong smell of burning wood and the whole city was covered in heavy fog. Only after a while I figured out that this was not a weather event, but in fact smoke rising from hundreds of thousands of households,” he recalls. Cooking with wood, charcoal and other polluting biomass is still prevalent in large parts of the world. These fuels release plumes of smoke and soot with significant health impacts that contribute to millions of premature deaths each year. Burning these fuels during the cooking process emits carbon dioxide, methane and other pollutants. In addition, unsustainable harvesting of fuel drives forest degradation and prevents reforestation. Despite these well-known and well-documented impacts, 2.4 billion people in Africa alone still rely on
cooking with these traditional practices, says the UN-affiliated organization Sustainable Energy for All (SEforALL). The environmental think tank Project Drawdown estimates that around 40 percent of families in low- and middle- income countries globally are primarily using cookstoves fuelled by wood or coal. Madagascar is a prime example of the hazards associated with these practices: Illness from household air pollution is the second leading cause of death in the country. Moreover, between 1953
and 2014, the country lost 44 percent of its natural forest cover. If deforestation continues at its current rate, all of Madagascar’s forests will be lost within 40 years, the World Wildlife Fund warns. Much of the island’s unique biodiversity, formed over 165 million years and including species found nowhere else on earth, is in acute danger of extinction. The environmental damage also has a severe impact on socio-economic development. With many unspoiled beaches, untouched rainforests and average temperatures not exceeding
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