The Iran war has driven cooking-fuel costs beyond the reach of low-income households across Africa and South Asia, with the switch back to charcoal and firewood threatening a decade of clean-cooking progress that had been lifting 13 million Africans a year off biomass fuel.
That is according to a joint investigation by reporters Allan Olingo and Aniruddha Ghosal tracking the impact from cooking fires in Nairobi’s Kibera settlement to waste-picking families on the outskirts of New Delhi, with the International Energy Agency (IEA) attributing annual forest loss the size of Ireland to global charcoal and firewood demand and the World Health Organization (WHO) attributing 2.9 million deaths in 2021 to air pollution.
In Kibera, one of Africa’s largest informal settlements, Brenda Obare said her LPG stove now sits cold for most of the week, with a charcoal burner taking its place outside her tin-roofed home. The price of cooking gas had run beyond what her household could absorb, she said.
“We don’t have many options. You use what you can afford,” Obare said.
The IEA reports that 12 million Africans a year had been gaining cooking access through liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) over the past five years, accounting for the bulk of the 13 million annual access gains across sub-Saharan Africa. The reversal now drives the fuelwood demand that the G20 forestry agenda under South Africa’s 2025 presidency identified as a leading driver of forest loss across the continent, as Wood Central reported earlier this year.
Mayukh Chatterjee, co-chair of the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) conflict and co-existence specialist group, said the longer the energy shock runs, the harder the conservation hit becomes. He pointed to an elephant conservation project in India’s northeastern Assam state where eateries had cut firewood consumption, with those gains now at risk of unwinding as households shift back to wood.
“That all risks going back to square one,” Chatterjee said.
Paula Kahumbu, chief executive of Nairobi-based WildlifeDirect, said rising biomass demand was already degrading watersheds and pushing fuel-gathering deeper into previously undisturbed wildlife habitat as households burned more wood. The household kitchen registered the conservation effect before the forest reserve did, she said.
“The first conservation risk from an energy shock in Africa is not abstract. It is household fuel switching,” Kahumbu said.
Charcoal seller Munyao Kitheka said demand had climbed across Nairobi’s low-income settlements, with charcoal still the most widely used cooking fuel across sub-Saharan Africa and a major driver of regional deforestation. India is seeing the same shift as the world’s second-largest LPG importer, with around 60 per cent of supply coming from the Gulf region according to S&P Global.
In Bhalswa, a waste-picking neighbourhood on the outskirts of New Delhi, social worker Rama said years of LPG outreach had collapsed under the price shock, with families on incomes below US$3 a day reverting to firewood stoves or returning to villages where wood is easier to find.
“Things are very, very bad,” Rama said.
Neha Saigal, a consultant with environmental and social justice startup Asar Social Impact Advisors, said the burden of fuel-gathering falls disproportionately on women and girls, with hours each day pulled away from work and school to source wood. The reversal threatens to undo a decade of policy investment, she said.
“Years of work went into making LPG aspirational. But a global issue like this can reverse some of those gains,” Saigal said.
The fuel shock is also hitting wildlife tourism, which contributes around 14 per cent of GDP in Kenya and Tanzania and underwrites park management, anti-poaching patrols and community conservation work. Airlines are cutting routes into Africa as fuel costs climb, Kahumbu said, with the income drop flowing straight to ranger budgets and field operations.
Kahumbu said the policy fix is targeted subsidies and stronger local supply chains, with biogas, solar and geothermal needing the same treatment as roads and grid during an economic shock.
“Treat conservation as essential infrastructure during economic shocks,” Kahumbu said.
