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TOLIARA, Madagascar — When Julien Andrianiana started selling charcoal 14 years ago, he was just one of a few dealers around. Most households in Toliara, a coastal city in southwestern Madagascar, still used firewood for cooking.

As the city’s population doubled, business became so brisk that he managed to send two of his children to college, “thanks to charcoal.” It quickly became the product of choice in kitchens not only in Toliara, but also in other fast-growing cities across Africa.

Charcoal — cleaner and easier to use than firewood, cheaper and more readily available than gas or electricity — has become one of the biggest engines of Africa’s informal economy. But it has also become one of the greatest threats to its environment.

In Madagascar, an island nation off the eastern African coast and one of the world’s richest nations in biodiversity, the booming charcoal business is contributing to deforestation. It is expected to exacerbate the effects of climate change, which has already disrupted farming, fueled a migration to cities, and pushed many rural residents into the one thriving business left: charcoal.

Sellers now appear on street corners throughout Toliara, hawking charcoal made from trees from the surrounding forests, an ecologically rich and fragile area with plants and animals found nowhere else. Throughout the day, their supplies are replenished by pickup trucks and convoys of ox-drawn carts.

But acquiring high-quality charcoal made from hardwood trees has become increasingly difficult for dealers like Mr. Andrianiana, 44, as a third straight year of drought has pushed ever more people into the charcoal trade. He now wakes up at 3 a.m. and rides his bicycle an hour north to try to strike deals with charcoal producers before his competitors do.

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“Most of the trees have been cut down,” he said recently, hours after securing only 60 bags of charcoal, below his daily average of 80. “Within five years, all the trees will be gone.”

Trees have been disappearing in a widening arc from Toliara in the past decade. As charcoal producers first culled trees in forests closest to Toliara, leaving villages surrounded only by thickets, the business has shifted to remote areas about 100 miles away, accessible by dirt roads and sometimes waterways.

About 100 miles southeast of Toliara, driving along National Road 10 — actually, just a narrow dirt road through the heart of the region that provides the city’s charcoal — I encountered Tsitomore, a 35-year-old cassava farmer, selling bags of charcoal by the roadside.

Holding an ax, Mr. Tsitomore, who like some people in Madagascar uses one name, took me for a short walk into the forest to a spot where he had chopped off the branches of a large tamarind tree — a hardwood that is considered sacred in many communities in Madagascar, and cannot be legally used for charcoal.

Mr. Tsitomore said he had begun supplementing his income by selling charcoal in recent years. Early this year, he became a full-time charbonnier, as charcoal burners are called in this former French colony, after a disastrous harvest caused by El Niño, which brought the worst drought in decades to parts of Africa. Climate change is believed to have intensified the weather phenomenon.

“It rains less and less nowadays,” he said as white smoke rose from the dirt kiln in which he was making charcoal by burning the tamarind wood without oxygen. “That’s why I started making charcoal. No one’s going to help me, and this is the quickest way to make money.”

Africa’s charcoal production has doubled in the past two decades and now accounts for more than 60 percent of the world’s total, according to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization. Rapid urbanization across the continent has increased demand for charcoal; it has become the preferred way to cook in cities. as people have left rural areas where firewood, typically dead wood collected from the forest floor, is a largely sustainable source of energy for cooking.

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In a poor neighborhood in Toliara one recent evening, housewives sat on stools outside their homes, keeping watch over pots on charcoal stoves. Monira Ferdinand, a 32-year-old mother of four who was preparing lentil soup, said she had used firewood back in her village, but the smoke would sting her eyes and the fire required constant fanning.

In the city, she and her neighbors use charcoal, though she is careful to buy the high-quality kind made from hardwood trees, not the cheaper charcoal made from mangrove trees or softer wood.

“The good quality charcoal lasts twice as long,” Ms. Ferdinand said. “And with the cheap stuff, it’ll die out if there’s even a little wind.”

As Africa’s population is expected to swell and urbanize at an even faster rate over the next decades, the continent’s demand for charcoal is likely to double or triple by 2050, according to the United Nations Environment Program.

The charcoal business, along with the expanding use of land for farming, is expected to increase deforestation and worsen the effects of climate change on a continent poorly equipped to adapt to it.

“It’s all interconnected, this long-term trajectory and the long-term effects on climate change,” said Henry Neufeldt, an expert on charcoal and climate change at the World Agroforestry Center in Nairobi, Kenya. “Just imagine transforming all that land into smoke, and not reforesting. In the next 30 years, a lot of forests and landscapes are going to be degraded because of charcoal demand, and because of the lack of policies to counter that effect.”

Though charcoal is one of the most widely used sources of energy in Africa, regulations regarding its production are rarely enforced, experts say. In the region surrounding Toliara, an estimated 75 percent of charcoal production is illegal, said officials at the World Wildlife Fund, which runs projects encouraging the sustainable production of charcoal.

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Randria Zigzag, the government official responsible for overseeing zones of intensive charcoal production near Toliara, said 45 percent was illegal. He said police officers at checkpoints on the road to Toliara should confiscate contraband charcoal being transported by unlicensed producers.

“But that’s not how things work in Madagascar,” Mr. Zigzag said. “In Madagascar, if you have money, you give money and you do what you want. The charcoal producers give money to police officers, who then tell them, ‘Go, go, go!’”

A dry region used to periodic droughts, southern Madagascar has become even drier in the past two decades. The so-called Spiny Forest in the region is blanketed with low-lying vegetation and dotted with several species of large trees.

People have gravitated to cities, like Toliara, where the population has risen by 50 percent in the past two decades to around 120,000, said Col. Jules Rabe, the chief administrator of the Toliara region. In a self-reinforcing movement, the migration to the cities has led to a greater demand for charcoal from rural areas.

In Antevamena, a village of cassava and corn farmers about 80 miles by road from Toliara, poor harvests have pushed more and more people into the charcoal economy as tree cutters, charcoal burners, transporters, middlemen, agents and financiers.

One farmer, Jackot Brula, 23, moonlights as a speculator, buying directly from the charbonniers in the surrounding forests and selling to agents based in Antevamena. He typically makes a 15-cent profit on each 110-pound bag of charcoal.

Hundreds of bags of charcoal in the village center were waiting to be collected by four agents working for the network’s financier, a woman whom villagers identified as a Madame Bijoux.

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Madame Bijoux, or Bijoux Ravaofotsy, says she ships her charcoal to a town near Toliara, where it is transported to the city.

She entered the business four years ago after losing customers at the refreshment stand she still runs along the main road. A competitor across the street had bought rooftop solar panels to power a refrigerator, bringing the novelty of cold drinks to her town, which is not connected to the national grid.

“People have become picky now,” she said, adding that, unable to afford solar panels herself, she went into charcoal instead. “The demand for charcoal is big.”

Things were far different in Befoly, a village not far from Toliara. Befoly supplied Toliara with charcoal until it ran out of trees.

“Everybody was involved in the charcoal business,” said Reginike Faralahy, 26, a former charbonnier who, in the boom years, made so much money that he was able to invest in goats and chickens. More than 20 other former charbonniers had left the village, some to work as petty traders in Toliara, he said.

The village chief, Evomasy, 48, said he believed that the trees’ disappearance had caused the recent severe droughts.

“We cut down everything,” he said, looking at the shrub land now surrounding his village. “We used to have trees all around us.”