AbstractsPhysics

In the last few decades the worldwide population growth and consequently the in-creasing demand for resources have put enormous pressure on the environment. To such an extent that in technically advanced countries some services of nature are replaced or expanded by anthropogenic inventions. For many services the spatial dimension of supply and demand go beyond a single region, thereby creating in-creased globalized environmental impacts. In other parts of the world, especially rural areas of developing countries, the flow of ecosystem goods and services re-mains local, thus also increasing local environmental impacts. This is especially the case in arid high mountainous areas, where isolation, scarce resources, and harsh climatic conditions additionally make people’s livelihood more challenging. Here, the demand for energy, mainly for heating and cooking, is significantly high. However, the local heterogeneity of energy usage, flow and management remains largely un-known (chapter 3). Against the global and regional backgrounds, this thesis aims at understanding the local energy consumption patterns. Additionally, it focuses on households’ fire-wood consumption and evaluating the factors influencing it. Furthermore, forest firewood supply, demand and governance at the local and national scales were ana-lyzed in the context of developing countries as well as countries in transition. Tajiki-stan was selected as a research area, due to its unique, but at the same time “repre-sentative” history of energy use. The local population currently needs to cope with the energy situation, and so understanding the heterogeneity of energy use in the arid high mountainous areas of the country is of special interest (chapter 5). Here, many factors (biophysical, socio-economic, governance) can potentially influence the amount of energy used. This was analyzed in the first research paper of this thesis, where data was collected through household interviews. The paper concluded that animal dung and firewood count as the main sources of energy in the rural moun-tainous areas of Tajikistan. The amount of consumed firewood was positively influ-enced by elevation, size of a household’s private garden and total hours of heating, while education level and access to a reliable supply of electricity influenced fire-wood consumption negatively. The results of the paper also showed that the main sources of firewood are private gardens, forests, gorges, along the roads and agricul-tural fields (chapter 6.1). While quantification of firewood sources outside of forests remains a challenge for a number of reasons, in the second paper forest firewood supply and demand was analyzed. The results suggest that in most case study areas the budget between forest firewood supply and demand remain positive, but are subject to uncertainties and must be interpreted with caution (chapter 6.2 and 9). Closely related to the second paper, in the third, forest biomass was estimated for the research area with high-resolution RapidEye satellite data. This paper… Advisors/Committee Members: Koellner, Thomas (advisor).