Taproots To Help Restore India’s Fading Green Cover

Context: State of the World’s Forests report 2020, shows that forest cover is declining despite the number of international conventions and national policies, hence requires a new approach.

Benefits of Forests:

• Provide a wide variety of ecosystem services
• Support countless and diverse species.
• stabilise the climate,
•  Sequester carbon
• Regulate the water regime.

Challenges in forest restoration

• Continued degradation and deforestation due to High dependency on forests by nearly 18% of the global human population
  • Out of India’s 21.9% population living under the poverty line, nearly 275 million people including local tribals depend on the forest for subsistence. that resulted in the degradation of nearly half of its forest(41%).
• Faulty tree planting  &forest restoration methods which is not compatible with local factors such as Planting
  • without considering the local ecology
  • forest in the wrong places such as savannah grasslands
• Increased Disturbances due to grazing, encroachment fire, and climate change.
  • Encroachment of nearly 1.48 MHA of forest
  • Grazing in nearly 75% of forest area is
• Low priority and insufficient funding: Whole affair of restoration i.e tree planting and the involvement of communities is a quite cost-intensive exercise.
• Conflict of interests among different stakeholders due to the involvement of multiple stakeholders in forest restoration.
• Contemporary researches are not fully compatible with diverse ecological habitats.

India ‘s Policy Response:

• Formation of joint forest management committees (JFMC) which involve local people in the protection and development of forests.
• To combat land degradation, India joined the Bonn Challenge with a pledge to restore 21 MHA of degraded and deforested land & later revised to 26 MHA to be restored by 2030.
  • Achievement: India brought 8 million hectares since 2011 under restoration.

Way Forward: Participation of local communities and adequate financing and incentives

• Area-specific strategies considering local factors such as
  • Participation of Local Communities
  • Local research considering ecological aspects, local disturbances & forest-dependent communities.

• Focus on natural forest restoration: that tends to have more carbon storage,less tech-sensitive, cost-effective, and conserve  more biodiversity,
• Adequate financing through involving corporates and dovetailing restoration activities with ongoing land-based programmes of various departments .
• Review before putting in place the required methodologies and area-specific strategies.
• Active engagement & capacity building of stakeholders including non-governmental organizations.