More than 95% of rural people in Dhanusha district rely upon traditional biomass fuels such as wood, dung and agricultural wastes for everyday tasks such as cooking, and heating purposes. Fuel wood provides only 38.5% of the biomass energy used. Dung provides 34%, crop residues 19%, and other biomass such as leaves and grass scrapings 8.5%. The use of residues has increased over time as fuel wood supplies have become increasingly restricted to households located near the forest or that own trees on private land. Throughout the district biomass fuels are the main source of energy, but in different areas the role of fuel wood, agricultural residues, small twigs and other biomass materials such as leaves and grass is different.
People living in southern part of the district which is characterized with high conflict and natural disaster situation are disadvantaged in terms of availability of natural resources as well as the socio-economic opportunities. Except some countable numbers of ?Land Lords?, majority of local people are small farmers and wage labor. Forest area is located about 25 Km. far and legal restrictions also exists for people of southern part of the district. The practices of private forestry for majority of people is absent and therefore, are restricted to use agricultural residues, dung cakes, fallen leaves and small woody parts of local bushes as fuel source. A part from the cooking fuel, ultra poor and the Dalit families do not have access to the national electric grid and are still using kerosene tuki for lighting purpose-results in village fire often in the summer.
Traditional fuels produce significant amount of carbon that are emitted to the atmosphere. The magnitude is much significant when the village fire occurs. In addition, the biomass is burned in an open fire or a typical inefficient stove, the combustion produces not only CO2 but relatively large quantities of soot, as well as powerful greenhouse gases such as methane, carbon monoxide and nitrous oxide. All of these particles and gases contribute to global warming and some are dangerous air pollutants that can lead to respiratory disease. Soot has a pivotal extra effect, too: it settles on glaciers and other areas of ice, darkening their surface and increasing the rate at which they melt.
The project has expected the following key results with successful implementation of the project activities: Creation of 40 nos. of social institutions at local level, installation of 1000 nos. of rocket stoves will help reducing more than 2000 tones of CO release in atmosphere per annum and at the same time installation of 200 solar tuki will help reducing emission of about 10 tones of CO per year, at least 100 poor and Dalit families will have access to clean drinking water and at least 50 beneficiary families have increased income by 20 percent. Further, local decision makers will allocate significant amount of VDC block grant in promotion of alternative energy technologies, and at least 2000 people will receive climate change related information from the information center.