Rural wood consumption patterns of local and immigrant households with differentiated access to resources in Xishuangbanna, Yunnan, China Charlotte Filt Mertens a,n , Thilde Bech Bruun b , Dietrich Schmidt-Vogt c,d , Jun He c , Andreas de Neergaard b a University of Copenhagen, Department of Geosciences and Natural Resource Management, Øster Voldgade 10, 1350 Copenhagen K, Denmark b Department of Plant and Environmental Sciences, University of Copenhagen, Thorvaldsensvej 40, 1871 Frederiksberg C, Denmark c Kunming Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences,132# Lanhei Road, Heilongtan, Kunming 650201, Yunnan, China d World Agroforestry Centre, East and Central Asia Region, Kunming Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Kunming, China HIGHLIGHTS  The hukou system directly affects rural wood access and consumption.  Immigrant households have little or no access to timber.  Registration status does not have a significant effect on firewood consumption.  Excluding immigrant households will limit policy outreach and efficiency. article info Article history: Received 10 July 2014 Received in revised form 28 January 2015 Accepted 29 January 2015 Keywords: China Hukou system Rural Energy Wood Access abstract In Xishuangbanna, China, rubber production has spread rapidly, resulting in extensive land use changes and an increasing influx of migrant workers who have come to find work on the plantations. These migrant workers have limited access to subsidies and the local collective forest due to the household registration system in China called hukou. To assess how these policy-based restrictions on access affect wood consumption and local communities, a case study was conducted in Manlin village, Xishuang- banna, undertaking a household and weight survey with local and immigrant households. The results show no significant difference in firewood consumption between the subpopulations, despite pre- dominantly more local than immigrant households have access to subsidised alternative energy sources. On the other hand, limited access to the collective forest is found to influence the choice of housing materials and living standards in immigrant households as they cannot access timber or afford brick houses. This paper highlights rural issues connected to the hukou system and suggests that rural energy and resource policies should take the growing population of immigrant workers into consideration in future to expand the reach of the polices to the de facto and not only de jure rural population and thus optimise policy efficiency. & 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction In China households are registered according to their hukou (hukou户 or huji 户籍), which officially categorises citizens as either ‘agricultural’ or ‘non-agricultural’ residents at a specific location. As the citizens' place of registration and hukou status determines their rights to benefits, the household registration system entails sys- tematic benefit discrimination among households, which in combi- nation with ongoing rural-urban migration has presented challenges with regard to social and economic development in China's urban areas (The Economist, 2013, 2014). While the hukou system has been receiving growing attention with respect to rural-urban migration, to the authors' knowledge little attention has been paid to the effects of the hukou system on livelihoods and development in rural areas. Contents lists available at ScienceDirect journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/enpol Energy Policy http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2015.01.040 0301-4215/& 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Abbreviations: I-REDDþ, reducing emissions from deforestation and forest de- gradation; LPG, liquefied petroleum gas; NTFP(s), non-timber forest product(s); NWFP(s), non-wood forest product(s); OECD, organisation for economic co-op- eration and development n Correspondence to: Overskæringen 7, 4th, 2200 Copenhagen N, Denmark. E-mail address: charlottefiltmertens@gmail.com (C.F. Mertens). Energy Policy 80 (2015) 112–121