Wood fuel, primarily in the form of firewood and charcoal, is the fuel most directly responsible for deforestation worldwide. In sub-Saharan Africa, where billions of people depend on wood and charcoal for daily cooking, fuelwood accounts for more than half (52%) of all forest degradation. Biofuels like palm oil biodiesel also contribute to forest loss, though their impact operates differently, driven by industrial-scale land clearing rather than household-level harvesting.
Charcoal and Firewood: The Biggest Fuel Threat
Roughly 2.4 billion people around the world cook with wood or charcoal as their primary energy source. In much of sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and parts of Southeast Asia, gathering firewood or buying charcoal is a daily necessity, not a lifestyle choice. This constant demand strips forests at a pace that often outrun regrowth, especially near growing cities.
Charcoal production is particularly destructive because the conversion process is inefficient. It takes roughly 5 to 10 kilograms of raw wood to produce a single kilogram of charcoal using traditional earth kilns. Trees are felled, stacked, and slowly burned under low-oxygen conditions, and the surrounding forest is progressively thinned outward from population centers. A study in Tete, Mozambique found that urban charcoal demand in 2014 degraded about 65 square kilometers of forest. With population growth and urbanization, researchers projected that figure could more than triple to 212 square kilometers by 2040 if production patterns stayed the same.
The damage is not limited to outright deforestation. Even when forests aren’t completely cleared, repeated harvesting degrades them, thinning the canopy, reducing biodiversity, and lowering the amount of carbon stored in remaining trees. Over time, degraded forests become grasslands or scrublands that never fully recover.
Why Africa Bears the Heaviest Impact
Across Africa, fuelwood and charcoal are responsible for over 52% of forest loss, a far larger share than on any other continent. Several factors converge to make this the case. Rapid urbanization drives charcoal demand because city dwellers buy charcoal rather than gathering their own wood. At the same time, access to alternatives like gas stoves or electricity remains limited or unaffordable for hundreds of millions of households. Charcoal is cheap, stores easily, and works with simple cookstoves that cost almost nothing.
The supply chain also fuels the problem. Charcoal production is a significant income source in rural areas. Producers often operate informally, harvesting from unmanaged forests with little oversight. As forests near cities are depleted, production pushes further into intact woodland, creating an expanding ring of degradation.
Palm Oil Biodiesel and Land Clearing
Palm oil is the world’s most widely used vegetable oil, and a growing share of it goes into biodiesel. Between 2000 and 2016, more than 11.7 million hectares of natural land were cleared in Malaysia and Indonesia, the two largest palm oil producers. However, the relationship between biodiesel specifically and that deforestation is more nuanced than headlines suggest.
Research from Purdue University found that less than 1% of land cleared in Indonesia and Malaysia can be tied to U.S. biofuel production. The total impact amounted to fewer than 60,000 hectares, or about 0.5% of the 11.7 million hectares converted during that period. The vast majority of palm oil goes to food products, cosmetics, and industrial uses rather than fuel. That said, biodiesel mandates in the EU and Southeast Asia have grown substantially, and any policy that increases overall palm oil demand creates market pressure to expand plantations into forested land.
Globally, commodity-driven deforestation (crops like soy, palm oil, cocoa, plus cattle ranching and mining) accounts for about 27% of all forest loss. Palm oil for fuel is a slice of that larger slice, meaningful but not the dominant force.
Wood Pellets for Electricity
A newer and more industrial form of wood fuel has emerged in the last two decades: wood pellets burned in power plants to generate electricity. Global wood pellet production topped 42 million metric tons in 2020, with a trade value surpassing $4.3 billion. The southeastern United States is a major exporter, shipping pellets primarily to Europe, where they count toward renewable energy targets. U.S. exports to the EU grew 12-fold between 2009 and 2019, reaching 6.8 million metric tons.
Environmental groups have raised concerns that this industry drives deforestation in the U.S. Southeast, but empirical evidence so far tells a more complicated story. A study published in Scientific Reports used satellite data and statistical methods to assess whether wood pellet mills affected local forest carbon stocks. The researchers found no statistically significant reduction in the carbon stored in living trees around pellet mills. Instead, higher demand for timber appeared to motivate landowners to invest in forest management, planting and growing more trees in commercially managed areas. This does not mean the industry is harmless (harvesting old-growth or biodiverse forests for pellets raises separate concerns), but large-scale deforestation driven by pellet demand has not materialized in the way some predicted.
How Improved Cookstoves Reduce Forest Loss
Because household wood fuel is the single largest fuel-related driver of deforestation, one of the most effective interventions is surprisingly simple: better cookstoves. Traditional three-stone fires and basic stoves waste enormous amounts of heat, requiring far more wood than necessary. Improved biomass cookstoves use design features like insulated combustion chambers and controlled airflow to burn wood more completely.
In northern Ethiopia’s Tigrai region, researchers found that households using improved cookstoves collected about 70 kilograms less wood and 20 kilograms less animal dung per month compared to those using traditional stoves. Scaled across the study area, adoption of improved stoves translated to a potential reduction in deforestation of roughly 1,400 hectares per year. That is a significant saving in a region where forests are already severely depleted.
Beyond cookstoves, transitioning households to liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), biogas, or electric cooking eliminates wood demand entirely. The challenge is cost and infrastructure. In many rural and peri-urban areas, the upfront price of a gas stove and consistent fuel supply remains out of reach, which is why charcoal and firewood persist as dominant cooking fuels despite their environmental toll.
Comparing Fuel-Driven Deforestation at a Glance
- Charcoal and firewood: The largest fuel-related cause of deforestation globally, responsible for over half of forest loss in Africa. Driven by billions of households cooking daily.
- Palm oil biodiesel: Contributes to tropical deforestation in Southeast Asia, but represents a small fraction of total palm oil demand. U.S. biofuel policy accounts for less than 1% of land clearing in Indonesia and Malaysia.
- Soy biodiesel: Linked to land conversion in Brazil’s Cerrado savanna, though most soy production serves animal feed markets rather than fuel.
- Wood pellets: A rapidly growing industry, but current evidence from the U.S. Southeast does not show significant local forest carbon loss tied to pellet production.
The pattern is clear: the fuel that causes the most deforestation is not an industrial product or a biofuel mandate. It is the most basic one, wood burned for cooking by people who have no affordable alternative.