It Happened In Banni

Context: India can become a leader in forest restoration if it supports community forest rights.

Background: Prime Minister Narendra Modi recently addressed the UN High-Level Dialogue on Desertification, Land Degradation and Drought and reiterated India’s track to achieve land degradation neutrality by 2030, citing the example of the Banni grassland.

About Banni Grasslands:

• Significance: One of Asia’s largest tropical grasslands, Banni, is home to great biological diversity and is the lifeline of its pastoralist communities.
• Challenges:
  • Climate change and the invasion by Prosopis juliflora — a species that covers nearly 54% of the grassland — have severely impacted its unique ecology.
  • A study conducted earlier this year recognises that unless action is taken, Banni grassland is headed for severe fodder scarcity.

Challenges of restoration:

• Little attention to the land and forest tenure of local communities – titles are still not formally recognised;
• Failing to incorporate traditional ecological knowledge;
• Not assisting communities to receive the opportunities they desire from restoration - Less than 5% of the total potential area has been brought under CFR.

Prospects Of India In Forest Restoration:

• Ambitious commitments:
  • More than 40% of the forest cover is open, often degraded. India has committed to restore 26 million hectares of degraded forests and lands by 2030 under the Bonn pledge.
  • As part of its Nationally Determined Contribution under the Paris Agreement, it has also targeted creating an additional carbon sink of 2.5 to 3 billion tonnes by 2030 through additional forest and tree cover.
• Potential of benefits: India’s potential to remove carbon through forest restoration is among the highest in the Global South as per a 2020 study published in Nature, Ecology and Evolution.
  • At 123.3 million, India also has the greatest number of people living near areas with forest restoration opportunities (within 8km).

Initiatives to restore degraded landscape:

• Restoration through local participation: Through the Forest Rights Act (FRA), 2006, Adivasis and other traditional forest-dwelling communities are legally empowered to stop any activity that adversely impacts biodiversity.
• Other initiatives: Social forestry in the 1970s, tree growers’ cooperative societies in the 1980s, Joint Forest Management in the 1990s or the National Afforestation Programme and Green India Mission.

Way Forward: Global attention is on ecosystem restoration — the United Nations theme for the decade.

• Recognise and support CFR rights: Community forests with legally recognised rights are healthier and associated with lower deforestation rates, higher carbon storage and biodiversity compared to other forests.
• Speeding up land titling and recognition: “land titling and recognition programmes, can lead to improved management of forests, including for carbon storage” -- IPCC 2019. Special Report on Climate Change and Land.