| dc.description.abstract | Secured access to energy, including wood and charcoal energy, is a basic need to ensure shared prosperity and security in Africa and achieve the 2030 Agenda for SDG7.
Charcoal is the solid residue remaining when wood is "carbonized" or "pyrolyzed" under controlled conditions in a closed space such as a charcoal kiln; Charcoal production for urban energy consumption is a main driver of forest degradation in Uganda. Charcoal is a prime source of energy for heating functions in Uganda, and most especially in urban and peri urban areas.
Surprisingly, policy makers pay little attention to the ways in which charcoal is produced and consumed.
Therefore, the research seeks to develop an application tool to estimate the equivalent grid power and number of trees that would replace a given percentage of heating functions done by charcoal based on the energy balance concept and the forest conversion factors.
This application can be used by the planners and policy makers to make informed decisions in developing interventions to replace charcoal with the possible alternative and afforestation strategies; The application focuses on creation of a linkage in the Charcoal Value chain.
Limited access to literature, old age of data and insufficient data on forest conversion factors for Uganda were among the limitations of the research; Various Methods have been developed and used for biomass measurement to help in the mitigation and control of wood and charcoal energy production and its associated effects on the environment.
The waterfall model of the systems development life cycle was adapted in the development of the application in the phases of planning, analysis, systems design and implementation. The application model was coded and tested in R programming language with functional dependencies from HTML, CSS, JavaScript and addon packages.
The application was deployed on the free R Studio Shinyapps.io server, with a URL https://afrinet-analytics.shinyapps.io/Charcoal-Equivalents-Statistics/.
For a country to guarantee an adequate supply of Charcoal fuel for its citizens and a mitigation plan for the associated effects is the development of a national fuelwood and charcoal policy interlocked with the national energy policy covering the whole field of energy. To overcome energy problems, it requires policy makers and planners to make data driven and informed decision thus the relevancy and use of the Charcoal Equivalents Statistics Calculator. | en_US |
