Mere reports that do not give birth to initiatives are pointless and will not help us in our efforts to handle serious environmental issues. There is a need to link workable and efficient initiatives with intelligence-gathering
The latest State of Forests Report compiled by the Forest Survey of India shows increase of green cover by 5,871 sq km in India between 2011 and 2013. Released by the Union Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change, the report placed only two per cent of the increase in the conventional forest boundaries and the rest outside the traditional forest areas.
In this 13th edition of the report, the FSI has departed from the beaten path by providing new information on the quality of forests such as intensity of regeneration, damage to crops, presence of weeds and grass, humus, incidents of fire and grazing. It has also come up with data on contiguity of the forest patches. This, in future, will help the Government to monitor the changes in the quality of forests along with their area and density.
However, in order to extract the maximum benefit for the environment from the meticulous chronicling of India’s forests by the FSI, the report findings need to be correlated to real time environmental threats and the larger issue of climate change. Nearly 45 per cent of the national forest grids are likely to undergo adverse impacts due to climate change. Most vulnerable forest grids being in the parts of central India, northern Western Ghats and Eastern Ghats, besides the Himalayan mountainous forests.
Climate change will be a blow to the already stressed forests in the upper Himalayan stretches, which are subjected to multiple challenges including over-extraction, livestock grazing and exploitative human intervention. Given this scenario, the ministry must assess how the rising green cover is actually contributing towards negating the ill effects of climate change.
The State of Environment reports, especially the SFR, need to evolve. The life-cycle of the SFR needs to move from the compilation and presentation phase to the implementation phase in order to achieve maximum benefit for the environment. The initiatives taken during the implementation phase can become the best practices, thereby, fulfilling the objective of the report and setting new environmental conservation standards.
The Government can also commission a survey periodically to assess the extent of positive impact of these best practices. For instance, a survey conducted by the United States Forest Service on the best practices for afforestation in the US concluded that the health benefits due to removal of air pollution by trees amounted to $6.8 billion a year in monetary terms. Furthermore, the survey also revealed that the increasing green cover helped to save over 850 lives and prevent 6,70,000 incidences of acute respiratory symptoms every year in the US. India too needs to harness tangible benefits from environmental reports.
Forests can contribute to the mitigation of climate change through carbon sequestration, carbon substitution, and carbon conservation. The extent to which they do so is a function of their management and the effectiveness of policies at the local, national and global levels. The Government must ensure policies that facilitate the forests to perform their natural function. This can be done by adopting comprehensive and integrated sustainable development approaches that combat deforestation, forest degradation and enhance the role of forests as carbon sinks.
Forest-based approaches can make a substantial contribution to climate change mitigation. They are not, however, a panacea for climate change and should be pursued simultaneously with other measures, including a shift towards low-carbon energy production and measures to assist the forest sector to adapt to climate change. For this, the well researched environmental reports, and in specific, the SFR can serve as a crucial basis.
People’s involvement is crucial towards achieving a sustained green cover growth and rejuvenation and reforestation of degraded forests, which account for eight per cent of the total 78.92 million hectares of green cover in the country. In order to facilitate greater levels of inclusion of the local population, the Government must encourage more detailed and analytical SFR that provide an insight into the complexities of the local population and their influence on the forest region. This can, in turn, help frame policies that seek to empower the people who can take meaningful decision pertaining to their regions. Mobilisation and allocation of resources at the grassroots level is equally important to ensure success for the Government initiatives which will help increase the green cover further.
Mere reports that do not give birth to initiatives are pointless and will not help us in our efforts to handle serious environmental issues. There is an urgent need to link intelligence-gathering with efficient initiatives to combat the challenge that climate change poses to the environment.