For a wider cover 

For a wider cover 

Context:

  • India needs to design its tree-based programmes better to meet climate goals.

Introduction:

  • In 2015, India made a Bonn challenge commitment to place into restoration 13 million hectares(Mha) of degraded land by 2020 and an additional 8 Mha by 2030.
  • India’s Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) have also pledged to sequester 2.5 to 3 billion tonnes of CO2 equivalent additionally by 2030 through enhanced tree cover.

State wise performance:

  • In July this year, Madhya Pradesh planted 66 million trees in 12 hours to enter the record books, overtaking Uttar Pradesh’s record of planting 49.3 million trees in a day, in 2016.

Conserve biodiversity:

  • The Bonn Challenge lays emphasis on landscape as a whole in order to benefit local livelihoods and conserve biodiversity.
  • The NDC lays emphasis not only on carbon sequestration but also adaptation to climate change through a strengthened flow of benefits to local communities that are dependent on forests and agriculture for sustenance.
  • This also reflects the spirit of India’s policy framework on forests which lays emphasis on a landscape approach to manage forest and tree cover, so that the flow of multiple ecosystem services including food security, climate mitigation, and adaptation, conservation of biological diversity and water supplies is secured.

Solutions:

  • There is need to protect healthy forest areas from deforestation, degradation and fragmentation.
  • There is also need to creatively integrate trees into different land uses.
  • India has numerous models that are suited for different regions and farm household’s sizes to draw upon, and must not rely on plantation drives alone to secure environmental and developmental outcomes.
  • It is also important to have in place a performance monitoring system to quantify tree survival rates and the benefits to communities.
  • This can be achieved through a combination of remote sensing, crowd sourced, ground-level monitoring with support from communities and civil society organisations.

Tree-based interventions:

  • Farmer-managed natural regeneration (FMNR) systems where farmers protect and manage the growth of trees and shrubs that regenerate naturally in their fields from root stock or from seeds dispersed through animal manure can also deliver several economic and ecosystem benefits.
  • In Niger, West Africa, farmers operating on 5 Mha of land added roughly 200 million on-farm trees using   FMNR in the past 30 years.
  • In India, the National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development’s (NABARD’s) ‘Wadi’ model and the Foundation for Ecological Security’s re-greening of village commons project are good examples of tree-based interventions which are proving to have great value in terms of cost-effectiveness as well as the range of benefits they deliver to communities.
  • An important success factor in large-scale tree based programme is security of tenure and land right.
  • In many parts of the world, securing tenure over forests has been established as a cost-effective way of achieving climate sequestration.
  • In Brazil, the average annual costs of providing communities with secure rights to their forests is $1.57 (₹103) per hectare (ha) while the resulting carbon-mitigation benefits range from $38/ha to $230/ha per year.

Restoration Opportunities Assessment Methodology (ROAM)

  • It is critical to ensure that owners have the right to manage and use these trees.
  • It is also critical to use scientific evidence-based methodology with a participatory approach to determine the right type of tree-based interventions most suitable to a certain land use.
  • A tool called the Restoration Opportunities Assessment Methodology(ROAM) is being used in 40 countries to find the best methods for landscape restoration.
  • The tool includes includes rigorous 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.

About COP 23

  • The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change(UNFCCC) is hosting the 23rd annual conference at Bonn, Germany.

What’s in the COP 23?

  • The conference named as COP23 is being held to further the provisions of the Paris Agreement, and achieve results in the execution guidelines.
  • While the aim of the event is much larger, nations attending the COP23 are scheduled to finalise the rulebook of the Paris Agreement. This process was started in Marrakesh 2016 meet. These rules will dictate how the Agreement would be monitored and executed. It will change the famous 1997 Kyoto Protocol by 2020.
  • The rulebook will include new international standards for measuring carbon emissions. These standards will ensure comparison of efforts made by various countries. However, a few negotiators, like the US, deny the impacts of climate change and argue that the efforts cost a huge amount of resources.

Paris Agreement:

  • The Paris Agreement is meant to make sure that the average surface temperature all over the world does not rise above two degrees Celsius, compared to pre-industrial times. To achieve this goal, countries have promised under the Paris Agreement to take a variety of self-determined actions to restrain the current rate of global warming.

About UNFCCC:

  • The UNFCCC was adopted in 1992 at the Rio Earth Summit, which marked the beginning of the international community’s first concerted effort to confront the problem of climate change. Known also as the Rio Convention, the UNFCCC established a framework for action to stabilise concentrations of greenhouse gases in the earth’s atmosphere. The UNFCCC entered into force in 1994, and nearly all of the world’s nations—a total of 195—have now signed on.

Conclusion:

India has the policy framework, the political will and financing to endorse landscape restoration. But, there is need for innovation and imagination to build replicable and scalable models with a participatory approach to achieve the country’s climate goals through landscape restoration.

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