Wood-starved and footsore.

The planet's poorest billion people are at risk from the global fuelwood crisis. But there is some progress.

Nearly half the people on earth soon may find themselves a little colder and a little hungrier as sources of cheap fuel for cooking and heating begin to disappear. Traditional wood-based fuels such as firewood and charcoal are becoming scarce as populations increase and forest land is converted to other uses.

For more than 100 million people, this shortage has reached crisis proportions. In just seven years the world population, now estimated at 5.5 billion, is expected to exceed 6.25 billion. Almost half--including nearly 600 million urban dwellers--may not have enough fuel to heat their homes and feed their families. By 2025, when the world population could reach 10 billion, finding fuel supplies that are reliable and inexpensive will be both a rural and an urban problem.

This need will give rise to innovative woodburning technologies as well as more tree planting. As if to prove that necessity is the mother of invention, the global fuelwood crisis is giving birth to an array of innovative energy technologies, new energy sources are being discovered, and new energy markets are emerging. But to understand what must be done, we must understand the processes that have brought so much of the world to the brink of disaster.

Nairobi, Kenya, is an example of a modern city where many residents rely on the old rural standby--wood. Although Nairobi is as cosmopolitan as New York and Paris are, some parts are blanketed in a perpetual blue haze that smells of woodsmoke and charcoal.

Urban poor everywhere suffer from inflation, overcrowding, poor sanitation, low wages, and the tax man. The cost of basic necessities rises each time a government devalues its currency, reduces subsidies, or tries to control fuel use.

Trying to find secure, dependable, and inexpensive fuel supplies in such an environment does more than just try people's patience. More time spent hunting for fuelwood means less time spent in tending to the rest of their lives. A never-ending cycle of searching for land, food, water, fire, shelter, and jobs binds them to a cycle of poverty, and adds to forest degradation in many places.

While nearly three billion people use wood and charcoal to some extent every day, for the world's poorest countries these fuels are a mainstay. People in countries such as Ethiopia, Nepal, and Bangladesh use wood and charcoal to meet more than 90 percent of their energy needs.

The poor are almost literally eating the forests and soils that sustain them. What capital has been produced and stored by nature is being consumed and not replaced. In the past 50 years, soil fertility has declined as erosion has claimed more than 2.9 billion acres of land. From 1850 through 1980, nearly 15 percent of the world's forest land was converted to other uses. In the 1980s, the reduction in forest cover was most evident in the tropics--a decline of 36.9 million acres per year.

The viciousness of this cycle becomes apparent when fuelwood supplies constrict and substitutes must be found. In the periodically drought-stricken villages of Africa's Sahel region and the underdeveloped districts in arid south Asia and northeast Brazil, wood-starved villagers use dung and stubble from their fields as fuel. Scouring fields for fuel robs the soil of vital nutrients and reduces crop yields, hence increasing the probability of hunger.

In addition to maintaining hearth and home, woodfuels--wood and charcoal--also power economic activity. Small entrepreneurs rely on a stable supply of wood to fuel cottage industries and operate kitchens in bars and restaurants. In Mexico, descendants of the Maya who live in Chiapas State are cutting firewood from the forests to operate cottage ceramic businesses. Selling pots and trays in nearby cities provides the cash necessary to survive and progress in a modern world. As the forests decline, fuelwood will become scarcer and more expensive; this could force hundreds of small-scale entrepreneurs out of business.

It's a similar story throughout the tropics, where many aspiring business-people prosper by running small bars and restaurants that burn wood and charcoal.

In Botswana, women prospered by running shabeens--an Irish word for a speakeasy--usually in a family's compound, and sometimes with micro breweries and distilleries on the premise. At the height of Botswana migration to the gold mines of South Africa, returning miners would relax and drink homebrews in their local shabeen. The "Shabeen Queen" would brew beer and distill liquors for the thirsty miners using wood scoured from the surrounding bush.

Earlier this century, when firewood was more plentiful and populations less dense, women were able to parlay their firewood stocks into cash by running home breweries. Access to cash enabled them to acquire cattle, a traditional source of wealth and status in Tswana society.

A dwindling wood supply affects both the cost of running a business or a home and the time needed to maintain it. Searching out, gathering, buying, and selling fuelwood all require time and energy. For some, it can use up as much as 30 percent of their time. Those who can afford to buy fuel may spend a considerable portion of their income on it--up to one-third in the fuel-starved tropics.

As supplies become scarcer and demand grows in increasingly crowded cities, prices increase. For example, in densely settled El Salvador, fuelwood prices rose by as much as 62 percent in 1990.

More often than not, the burden of finding wood for home use falls on women and children. It may take several hours to get to a wood source and many more to return home with the fuel, depriving women of the time and energy to do other things.

A look at wood-gathering in Nepal shows how women's lives revolve around the procurement of traditional fuels and the burden placed on them by energy shortages. Many rural Nepalese women rely on wood as their principal source of energy. And, as in many tropical countries, subsistence crop production, wood collection, and food preparation are woman's work.

Adding to the burden, Nepalese women must gather enough fuel not only to feed their families but also to cook kundo, a prepared cattle feed that increases the nutritional value of crop byproducts.

At present, there are three principal responses to fuelwood shortages in tropical and developing regions: the emergence of substitute fuels, the creation and distribution of energy-efficient stoves, and the planting of trees for fuel.

The most common substitute for wood is kerosene, which is more readily adopted in urban settings. In order for kerosene to have widespread use, however, urban dwellers must have easy access to reliable sources, and have the income to buy the fuel, in addition to oil stoves and lamps. The adoption of kerosene as a home energy source, however, increases petroleum consumption and therefore petroleum production--not always politically acceptable in industrial countries.

The search for more efficient wood-burning technologies goes back to Benjamin Franklin and the beginning of the modern era. In response to a severe fuelwood shortage in colonial America, Franklin designed a new stove that enclosed the open hearth to conserve energy. Contemporary campaigns to increase the efficiency of fuelwood use began with efforts to improve charcoaling methods. As early as 1885, improved kilns were introduced in India; portable steel kilns were introduced there in 1891.

Improved stoves for domestic use were not widely available in most of the tropics until the 1970s and 1980s, when international development agencies energetically sponsored stove design and dissemination programs. Although rural areas were targeted, it was urban dwellers who were more likely to adopt the improved product. In some cities like Nairobi, improved stoves are so popular that the majority of traditional stove makers have voluntarily switched to producing more energy-efficient models.

The most extensive response to the fuelwood shortage--tree planting--is taking root through innovative natural-resource management techniques such as agroforestry. Since the mid-70s, governments, foundations, and aid agencies have started to help farmers plant trees.

Through research and by paying attention to the farmers themselves, foresters and development agencies are learning to create more effective tree-planting programs. There is increased knowledge about fuelwood species, and about planting and management techniques. More importantly, these experts have a better understanding of what motivates farmers in this part of the world to plant and care for trees. They are recognizing that many rural people do not consider fuelwood production as separate from growing wood for other uses. The most successful projects combine plantings for food, fodder, fuel, and sale.

One successful tree-planting program of the 1980s was carried out by the Pan American Development Foundation in Haiti. The key to its success was allowing farmers to take trees for their own. Farmers in this desperately poor Caribbean country knew trees had both an immediate use--fuel and fodder--and a long-term one--mature trees could be cut and sold as construction poles.

In another example, many farmers in the densely settled farmlands of highland Kenya are responding to increased demand and diminished supplies by establishing their own woodlots. The trees are often grown for sale as construction poles, but in the meantime cut and wind-felled branches help supplement traditional fuel supplies. In some of these highland areas, tree planting meets yet another need--it allows farmers to maintain their claims to land.

Growing populations will need more energy, and that will increase pressures for people to adopt energy-efficient technologies and plant more trees. There is a lesson, perhaps, in the vision of Menelik II. In the late 19th century, he founded Addis Ababa as the capital of the Ethiopian empire. While surveying the site for a permanent court near a spring in the Ethiopian highlands, he is said to have turned to his wife and promised to build her a magnificent city. One of the first steps in building Addis Ababa was the creation of fuelwood plantations as an integral part of the new city.

Seeds of change are being planted throughout the tropics. Community groups and governments, working together and with international assistance, can stimulate local conservation action. A couple of years ago, in the Dinangourou area of Mali, the international relief agency CARE imitated Menelik II's foresight by shepherding a village youth association through the process of ecological habitat restoration.

The youth association was formed by village elders as a way to tackle two major problems--lack of water and poor soils. The young people were taught the link between tree planting and soil conservation, food production, and economic gain and in the process restored land degraded by drought, overgrazing, and fuelwood gathering.

The young people mixed into the soil dung gathered from around the village, then intercropped trees and millet. The idea was that trees would hold the soil and provide a future source of fuelwood and construction poles, and the millet would be sold to raise money to dig a village well.

This one small village in the middle of the West African Sahel is showing the way for thousands of other villages and towns. It is this kind of forward thinking--which combines existing resources with new ways of looking at trees--that just might ward off a worldwide fuelwood shortage.

Ted Field is American Forests' director of education.