March 21 is celebrated as the World Forest Day to create awareness about forests and their importance in our lives. The theme this year is ‘Forests and Energy’.
Covering one-third of Earth’s landmass, forests perform vital tasks across the globe.
From providing green cover to being the biosphere reserves, forests have a lot of importance with over 1.6 billion people, including over 2,000 native cultures directly depending upon the forests. The forests provide livelihoods, shelter, fuel, food and hence are an important part of our ecosystem. However, despite all of these benefits, deforestation has been a growing concern over the years. To help create awareness about this, and to engage more people around the world in environment-friendly practices, the March 21 is celebrated as the World Forest Day.
United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution on December 21, 2012, to declare March 21 as the international forest day.
With the resolution, United Nations hopes to encourage its member states to actively participate in events related to forests and promotion of the various benefits of them. Activities like tree planting have also been made part of the event. The aim is also to raise awareness amongst people over the role of forests in poverty eradication, environmental sustainability, and for food security.
Forests provide shelter to over 80 per cent of the terrestrial species of animals, plants and insects and hence with the widespread destruction that is happening at the rate of 13 million hectares per year, these species have been having a hard time adapting. This has further led to a loss of some species from their natural environment and from the habitat thus leading to fears of extinction.
Theme
‘Forests and energy’ have been decided as the theme for this year’s international forest day. The reason behind this theme is to showcase the importance of wood energy in improving people’s lives, mitigating climate change, and in empowering sustainable development.
Wood is a source of renewable energy used all over the country and the world extensively for a long list of resources. Not only is it used for energy generation but also for creating furniture, for paper, construction or other items of daily use and the list is endless.
Wood energy helps deal with climate change and works in tandem with sustainable development, showcasing the further need for the forests. Forests are known to hold energy content around ten times of the annual energy consumption of the world!
India has a lot of different type of forests in different parts of the country. The total forest and tree cover in India is 79.42 million hectare, approximately 24.16 per cent of India’s geographical area (India State of Forest Report 2015, Ministry of Environment and Forests, Government of India).
The few main categories of forests in India are:
- Tropical Forests
- Found in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, the Western Ghats, the coastline of peninsular India, and Assam.
- Tropical forests are known to be biodiversity hotspots where a lot of flora and fauna are found.
- Trees like jackfruit, betel nut palm, jamun, mango, hollock, sal, teak, whistling pines, mangrove dates, spurge, caper etc are found commonly in various types of tropical forests.
- Alpine Forests
- Found in the Himalayas at altitudes ranging from 2,900 to 3,800 m above sea level in regions that undergo heavy rainfall.
- Alpine forests contain trees like Fir, kail, spruce, rhododendron, plum, yew, Juniper, honeysuckle, artemisia, potentilla, etc.
- Subtropical Montane Forests
- Found in the eastern, western Himalayas, western ghats and Shivalik hills at varying altitudes of 1000-2000 m above sea level.
- Subtropical Montane Forests have trees like Evergreen oaks, chestnuts, sals, pines, chir, olive, acacia modesta and pistacia, etc are the trees found in these forests.
- Temperate Montane Forests
- Found in the Himalayas in Sikkim, Arunachal Pradesh, Nilgiri hills in Kerala between 1500 and 3300 metres where the annual rainfall varies from 150 cm to 300 cm.
- Deodar, Chilauni, Indian chestnut, birch, plum, machilus, Cinnamomum, litsea, magnolia, blue pine, oak, hemlock, pines, cedars, silver firs, spruce, etc., chilgoza, etc are some of the important trees found here.
- Sub-Alpine Forests
- They are found in the Himalayas extending from Kashmir to Arunachal Pradesh at a height of 2900-3500 m.
- The trees that are found here commonly are juniper, rhododendron, willow, black currant, red fir, black juniper, birch, larch etc.
International forest day marks the importance of forests in our lives. One of the major sources of oxygen, Forests’ have a greater role to play in the Earth’s ecosystem. And hence need to be conserved with proper mandates on protection of forests!
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- Lowering Emissions by Accelerating Forest Finance (LEAF) Coalition, a collective of the United States, United Kingdom and Norway governments, came up with a $1 billion fund.
- LEAF is supported by transnational corporations (TNCs) like Unilever plc, Amazon.com, Inc, Nestle, Airbnb, Inc as well as Emergent, a US-based non-profit.
- The world lost more than 10 million hectares of primary tropical forest cover last year, an area roughly the size of Switzerland.
- Ending tropical and subtropical forest loss by 2030 is a crucial part of meeting global climate, biodiversity and sustainable development goals. Protecting tropical forests offers one of the biggest opportunities for climate action in the coming decade.
- Tropical forests are massive carbon sinks and by investing in their protection, public and private players are likely to stock up on their carbon credits.
- The LEAF coalition initiative is a step towards concretising the aims and objectives of the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) mechanism.
- REDD+ was created by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). It monetised the value of carbon locked up in the tropical forests of most developing countries, thereby propelling these countries to help mitigate climate change.
- It is a unique initiative as it seeks to help developing countries in battling the double-edged sword of development versus ecological commitment.
- The initiative comes at a crucial time. The tropics have lost close to 12.2 million hectares (mha) of tree cover last year according to global estimates released by Global Forest Watch.
- Of this, a loss of 4.2 mha occurred within humid tropical primary forests alone. It should come as no surprise that most of these lost forests were located in the developing countries of Latin America, Africa and South Asia.
- Brazil has fared dismally on the parameter of ‘annual primary forest loss’ among all countries. It has lost 1.7 mha of primary forests that are rich storehouse of carbon. India’s estimated loss in 2020 stands at 20.8 kilo hectares.
- Between 2002-2020, Brazil’s total area of humid primary forest reduced by 7.7 per cent while India’s reduced by 3.4 per cent.
- Although the loss in India is not as drastic as in Brazil, its position is nevertheless precarious. For India, this loss is equivalent to 951 metric tonnes worth carbon dioxide emissions released in the atmosphere.
- It is important to draw comparisons between Brazil and India as both countries have adopted a rather lackadaisical attitude towards deforestation-induced climate change. The Brazilian government hardly did anything to control the massive fires that gutted the Amazon rainforest in 2019.
- It is mostly around May that forest fires peak in India. However, this year India, witnessed massive forest fires in early March in states like Odisha, Uttarakhand, Madhya Pradesh and Mizoram among others.
- The European Union’s Copernicus Atmospheric Monitoring Service claimed that 0.2 metric tonnes of carbon was emitted in the Uttarakhand forest fires.
- Implementation of the LEAF Coalition plan will help pump in fresh rigour among developing countries like India, that are reluctant to recognise the contributions of their forest dwelling populations in mitigating climate change.
- With the deadline for proposal submission fast approaching, India needs to act swiftly on a revised strategy.
- Although India has pledged to carry out its REDD+ commitments, it is impossible to do so without seeking knowledge from its forest dwelling population.
Context:-
At the recently concluded Leaders’ Summit on Climate in April 2021, Lowering Emissions by Accelerating Forest Finance (LEAF) Coalition, a collective of the United States, United Kingdom and Norway governments, came up with a $1 billion fund plan that shall be offered to countries committed to arrest the decline of their tropical forests by 2030.
[wptelegram-join-channel link=”https://t.me/s/upsctree” text=”Join @upsctree on Telegram”]What is LEAF Coalition?
Why LEAF Coalition?
Brazil & India
According to the UN-REDD programme, after the energy sector, deforestation accounts for massive carbon emissions — close to 11 per cent — in the atmosphere. Rapid urbanisation and commercialisation of forest produce are the main causes behind rampant deforestation across tropical forests.
Tribes, Forests and Government
Disregarding climate change as a valid excuse for the fires, Indian government officials were quick to lay the blame for deforestation on activities of forest dwellers and even labelled them “mischievous elements” and “unwanted elements”.
Policy makers around the world have emphasised the role of indigenous tribes and local communities in checking deforestation. These communities depend on forests for their survival as well as livelihood. Hence, they understand the need to protect forests. However, by posing legitimate environmental concerns as obstacles to real development, governments of developing countries swiftly avoid protection of forests and rights of forest dwellers.
For instance, the Government of India has not been forthcoming in recognising the socio-economic, civil, political or even cultural rights of forest dwellers. According to data from the Union Ministry of Tribal Affairs in December, 2020 over 55 per cent of this population has still not been granted either individual or community ownership of their lands.
To make matters worse, the government has undertaken systematic and sustained measures to render the landmark Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006 ineffective in its implementation. The Act had sought to legitimise claims of forest dwellers on occupied forest land.
Various government decisions have seriously undermined the position of indigenous people within India. These include proposing amendments to the obsolete Indian Forest Act, 1927 that give forest officials the power to take away forest dwellers’ rights and to even use firearms with impunity.
There is also the Supreme Court’s order of February, 2019 directing state governments to evict illegal encroachers of forest land or millions of forest dwellers inhabiting forests since generations as a measure to conserve wildlife. Finally, there is the lack of data on novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) deaths among the forest dwelling population;
Tardy administration, insufficient supervision, apathetic attitude and a lack of political intent defeat the cause of forest dwelling populations in India, thereby directly affecting efforts at arresting deforestation.
Way Forward
Tuntiak Katan, a global indigenous leader from Ecuador and general coordinator of the Global Alliance of Territorial Communities, aptly indicated the next steps at the Climate Summit:
“The first step is recognition of land rights. The second step is the recognition of the contributions of local communities and indigenous communities, meaning the contributions of indigenous peoples.We also need recognition of traditional knowledge practices in order to fight climate change”
Perhaps India can begin by taking the first step.