What is the issue?
- In 2015, India made a Bonn Challenge commitment to:
- restore 13 million hectares (Mha) of degraded land by 2020.
- bring an additional 8 Mha by 2030.
- India’s NDCs have also pledged to sequester 2.5 to 3 billion tonnes of CO2 equivalent additionally by 2030.
- India needs to assess and design its tree-based environmental programmes to meet its climate goals.
What is the shortfall?
- Recently, Madhya Pradesh planted 66 million trees in 12 hours to enter the record books, overtaking earlier record of Uttar Pradesh.
- As different States work to achieve the above commitments, it appears that there is an over-reliance on plantations.
- Resultantly, large-scale plantation drives do not really achieve the goals because they lack focus on:
- species selection.
- quality of planting materials.
- survival rates of planting materials.
- tenure and resource rights to ensure that the benefit flows to communities.
What should the approach be?
- Plantations are but one among a larger group of interventions.
- Notably, neither the Bonn Challenge nor the NDCs are about large-scale plantations alone.
- More emphasis is essential on landscape approaches, a model aimed at improving the ecology of a landscape as a whole.
- Only this can contribute to the larger goal of climate change adaptation by benefitting the local communities dependent on forests and agriculture.
- And ensure a flow of multiple ecosystem services such as food security, biodiversity conservation and water supplies.
- Besides, protecting the existing healthy forest areas from deforestation, degradation and fragmentation is crucial.
What are the options?
- India has numerous models that are suited for different regions and farm household sizes whereby trees can creatively be integrated into different land uses.
- Agroforestry - At least 35 types of agroforestry models are practised in India.
- It involves planting different trees that provide timber, fruits, fodder, fuel and fertilizers along with food crops.
- This diversifies income from farming as well as improves land productivity.
- Natural regeneration - The Farmer-managed natural regeneration (FMNR) systems deliver a combined economic and ecosystem benefit.
- Under this, farmers protect and manage the growth of trees and shrubs that regenerate naturally in their fields.
- The regeneration could be from root stock or from seeds dispersed through animal manure.
- The FMNR system can contribute to increased carbon sequestration as well as to annual agricultural production.
- Besides, NABARD’s ‘Wadi’ model and the Foundation for Ecological Security’s re-greening of village commons project are good examples of tree-based interventions.
- These are proving to be of great value in terms of cost-effectiveness as well as the range of benefits they deliver to communities.
What are the preconditions?
- Land rights - An important success factor in large-scale tree-based programmes is security of tenure and land rights.
- In several parts of the world, securing tenure over forests has been established as a cost-effective way of achieving climate sequestration.
- It is also critical to ensure that owners have the right to manage and use these trees.
- Monitoring system - A performance monitoring system is essential to quantify tree survival rates and analyse the benefits to communities.
- Remote sensing, crowd sourced, ground-level monitoring, etc are the technological means to monitor.
- These can better be combined with support from communities and civil society organisations to have a qualitative assessment of the programmes.
- Methods - It is critical to determine the right type of tree-based interventions most suitable to a certain land use.
- This is achieved by using scientific evidence-based methodology with a participatory approach.
- A tool called the ROAM (Restoration Opportunities Assessment Methodology) is being used in 40 countries for this purpose.
- The ROAM includes analysis of spatial, legal and socio-economic data and draws on consultations with key stakeholders to determine the right type of interventions.
- In India, this tool is being piloted in Uttarakhand and Madhya Pradesh.
Quick Fact
'Wadi' model
- This is a tribal development programme launched by the National Bank for Agriculture & Rural Development (Nabard)
- It is a holistic model for tribal development aiming at economic uplift through sustainable agriculture, social empowerment and improvement in quality of life.
- The financial assistance under Wadi is provided from Tribal Development Fund set up by Nabard out of its profit.
Source: The Hindu
