We must renew our commitment to enhancing India’s forest cover

Context: California’s wildfires remind us that climate change is real and the quest to increase our green cover needs a fresh impetus

Wildfires 

• Recent California Wildfire

• Coverage: It spread over three western states of the US

• Deadly combination of high  intensity, scale, speed and duration,

• Fire triangle: 

• This includes fuel, oxygen and heat which are crucial for the creation of a wildfire
• Fire triangle abetted by strong winds, a small spark caused by human error or lightning is deadly.

• Effects of wildfires:

• Impact on life and property,
• Long-term effects on the quality of rivers and lakes
• Biodiversity loss 
• Releases carbon dioxide into the air
• Deforestation

• Benefits

• Regulating water flows
• Sequestering carbon and nurturing biodiversity

Vulnerability of Forests

• Rain forest: In 2019, the world lost a football field of rainforest every six seconds. 

• Tree cover: 

• Lost nearly 11.9 million hectares (one hectare is 0.01 sq km) of tree cover in 2019
• 3.8 million of it from mature, humid tropical primary forests

• Front runners: Brazil, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Indonesia have lost the most tropical primary forest cover in recent years
• Case of India: 

• Over the past 20 years, India has lost 328,000 hectares of humid primary forest.
• forest loss in the North-East is very high
• Deforestation and destruction of wetlands are among the leading causes of annual floods

Recent steps

• Decrease in rate of loss: Countries like Colombia and Costa Rica have been able to slow forest loss.
• Afforestation: China, the US, Ethiopia, and India have also planted billions of trees over the last decade
• Billion Tree Campaign has morphed into a Trillion Tree Campaign.

Way Forward

• Provide Alternatives: compensate marginalized populations on the periphery of forests and incentivize them not to flatten forests.

• Payment for ecosystem services (PES) : 

• This method shall be replicated which was pioneered in Costa Rica, and has been successfully used in Mexico.

• US Conservation Reserve Program - pays out about $1.8 billion a year under nearly 800,000 contracts with farmers to refrain from cultivating environmentally sensitive land.
• China’s Grain-for-Green scheme - hands out nearly $4 billion a year to retire sloping plots (greater than 25 degrees) that are prone to soil erosion 

• Give up fossil fuels, reduce material consumption.

• India: set up an ambitious goal of first retaining and then increasing its forest cover. 

Conclusion

• Wildfires in California serve as a timely reminder that climate change is here and is not some hypothesis.