Refugees Spend $2 Billion a Year on Firewood While 25 Million Trees Are Cut Down Around Their Settlements — and Clean Alternatives Keep Failing at Adoption

Over 90% of refugees in rural settlements have no access to modern energy for cooking. An estimated 80% of displaced people cook with firewood or other biomass, driving the destruction of 20–25 million trees around refugee settlements annually. Displaced populations collectively spend over $2 billion per year on inefficient energy — in Kenya's Dadaab complex, refugee households spend 24% of their limited income on cooking fuel. Clean alternatives exist and have been demonstrated: LPG reduced firewood demand by 70–80% in Tanzania and Bangladesh pilots. But distribution programs repeatedly fail to achieve sustained adoption because they address fuel supply without addressing the behavioral, economic, and infrastructural ecosystem required for a permanent transition. Cooking fuel is rarely included in humanitarian food rations, treating energy access as a secondary concern despite its centrality to daily survival.

The consequences of firewood dependence are compounding and gendered. Women and girls bear the primary burden of fuel collection, traveling 5–50 km in some settings and facing risk of gender-based violence, physical injury, and lost educational or economic time. Indoor cooking with biomass produces household air pollution that WHO links to 3.2 million premature deaths annually, disproportionately affecting women and children. Deforestation around refugee settlements creates tensions with host communities whose forests are being consumed, undermining the social compact that allows refugees to remain. The environmental damage — in Bangladesh, over 820 tonnes of trees (4+ hectares) per day were cut to supply Rohingya refugee cooking fuel — can be irreversible. And the financial burden is regressive: the poorest families pay the highest proportion of their income for the least efficient energy, deepening poverty with every meal cooked.

Improved cookstove distribution programs (Rocket stoves, institutional stoves) have been the most common intervention for two decades. They reduce fuel consumption by 30–60% but face persistent adoption barriers: stoves crack or break within months, replacement parts are unavailable, cooking practices and food traditions don't always adapt to new stove designs, and where firewood is not perceived as scarce, the motivation to change is low. LPG distribution programs have shown dramatic short-term results but face sustainability challenges: irregular supply chains deter continued use after initial excitement wears off, the upfront cost of LPG equipment creates a barrier ("LPG is viewed as fuel for rich people"), and without ongoing subsidy, the recurring cost of gas refills exceeds what many refugee families can afford. Ethanol and biogas programs have been piloted in Sudan and Rwanda respectively, but remain limited to specific partnerships with local producers and haven't achieved scale. The fundamental pattern is technology-push: organizations distribute hardware (stoves, cylinders, solar panels) without building the market ecosystem — supply chains, maintenance capacity, financing models, and demand creation — needed for sustained adoption. Rwanda's 2018 ban on firewood distribution in refugee camps demonstrates the difficulty: removing the default option without ensuring alternatives are accessible and affordable creates crisis rather than transition.

A market-systems approach that treats clean cooking energy as a service rather than a product distribution problem. Key elements: (1) micro-enterprise models where refugees themselves operate fuel distribution businesses, creating economic incentive for supply chain reliability; (2) pay-as-you-cook financing that matches the incremental purchasing pattern refugees already use for firewood (small, frequent amounts) rather than requiring upfront capital investment; (3) fuel-agnostic stove designs that can transition between available fuels (biomass pellets, ethanol, LPG) as supply chains develop, rather than locking families into a single fuel that may become unavailable; (4) integration of cooking energy into humanitarian response planning alongside food, shelter, and water — not as an afterthought. The UNHCR Refugee Environmental Protection Fund and Global LPG Partnership's $3.4M Tanzania market creation plan represent early moves toward systems thinking, but the approach is still nascent.

A student team could design a pay-as-you-cook business model for a specific refugee settlement, incorporating: analysis of current fuel expenditure patterns, design of a payment mechanism compatible with available financial infrastructure (mobile money, token-based), supply chain logistics for fuel delivery, and a financial model showing break-even conditions for a refugee-operated micro-enterprise. This is a feasible design proposal. A more technically oriented team could prototype a multi-fuel cookstove that transitions between locally available fuel types with minimal user modification, targeting the specific fuel landscape of a particular settlement. Skills in industrial design, business model development, behavioral economics, or energy systems would be most relevant.