Energy transition from firewood to LPG triggers large-scale greening trend: A case-study from the Jharkhand province in India

The Ujjwala scheme, launched in 2016 by the Government of India, aimed to provide LPG access to poor households. In the Indian province of Jharkhand, the Ujjwala scheme successfully increased LPG access from 25 % in 2015 to 75 % in 2020. As such, an abrupt increase in LPG can influence firewood consumption patterns and forest biomass, so we examined temporal trends in MODIS-NDVI time-series data for forested areas of Jharkhand. We observed a substantial increase in NDVI coinciding with the implementation of the Ujjwala scheme. The magnitude of residual-NDVI obtained after accounting for confounding environmental factors using static and dynamic linear models was positively correlated with the number of LPG connections. The causation for this observed positive correlation was examined with household-level field surveys, the villages associated with the greening trend comparatively had higher LPG coverage and reduced firewood consumption. Our study provides evidence of the possibility of achieving a large-scale positive impact on socio-ecological systems with initiatives like the Ujjwala scheme.