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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Steve Ovett, the famous British middle-distance athlete, won the 800-metres gold medal at the Moscow Olympics of 1980. Just a few days later, he was about to win a 5,000-metres race at London’s Crystal Palace. Known for his burst of acceleration on the home stretch, he had supreme confidence in his ability to out-sprint rivals. With the final 100 metres remaining,
[wptelegram-join-channel link=”https://t.me/s/upsctree” text=”Join @upsctree on Telegram”]Ovett waved to the crowd and raised a hand in triumph. But he had celebrated a bit too early. At the finishing line, Ireland’s John Treacy edged past Ovett. For those few moments, Ovett had lost his sense of reality and ignored the possibility of a negative event.
This analogy works well for the India story and our policy failures , including during the ongoing covid pandemic. While we have never been as well prepared or had significant successes in terms of growth stability as Ovett did in his illustrious running career, we tend to celebrate too early. Indeed, we have done so many times before.
It is as if we’re convinced that India is destined for greater heights, come what may, and so we never run through the finish line. Do we and our policymakers suffer from a collective optimism bias, which, as the Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman once wrote, “may well be the most significant of the cognitive biases”? The optimism bias arises from mistaken beliefs which form expectations that are better than the reality. It makes us underestimate chances of a negative outcome and ignore warnings repeatedly.
The Indian economy had a dream run for five years from 2003-04 to 2007-08, with an average annual growth rate of around 9%. Many believed that India was on its way to clocking consistent double-digit growth and comparisons with China were rife. It was conveniently overlooked that this output expansion had come mainly came from a few sectors: automobiles, telecom and business services.
Indians were made to believe that we could sprint without high-quality education, healthcare, infrastructure or banking sectors, which form the backbone of any stable economy. The plan was to build them as we went along, but then in the euphoria of short-term success, it got lost.
India’s exports of goods grew from $20 billion in 1990-91 to over $310 billion in 2019-20. Looking at these absolute figures it would seem as if India has arrived on the world stage. However, India’s share of global trade has moved up only marginally. Even now, the country accounts for less than 2% of the world’s goods exports.
More importantly, hidden behind this performance was the role played by one sector that should have never made it to India’s list of exports—refined petroleum. The share of refined petroleum exports in India’s goods exports increased from 1.4% in 1996-97 to over 18% in 2011-12.
An import-intensive sector with low labour intensity, exports of refined petroleum zoomed because of the then policy regime of a retail price ceiling on petroleum products in the domestic market. While we have done well in the export of services, our share is still less than 4% of world exports.
India seemed to emerge from the 2008 global financial crisis relatively unscathed. But, a temporary demand push had played a role in the revival—the incomes of many households, both rural and urban, had shot up. Fiscal stimulus to the rural economy and implementation of the Sixth Pay Commission scales had led to the salaries of around 20% of organized-sector employees jumping up. We celebrated, but once again, neither did we resolve the crisis brewing elsewhere in India’s banking sector, nor did we improve our capacity for healthcare or quality education.
Employment saw little economy-wide growth in our boom years. Manufacturing jobs, if anything, shrank. But we continued to celebrate. Youth flocked to low-productivity service-sector jobs, such as those in hotels and restaurants, security and other services. The dependence on such jobs on one hand and high-skilled services on the other was bound to make Indian society more unequal.
And then, there is agriculture, an elephant in the room. If and when farm-sector reforms get implemented, celebrations would once again be premature. The vast majority of India’s farmers have small plots of land, and though these farms are at least as productive as larger ones, net absolute incomes from small plots can only be meagre.
A further rise in farm productivity and consequent increase in supply, if not matched by a demand rise, especially with access to export markets, would result in downward pressure on market prices for farm produce and a further decline in the net incomes of small farmers.
We should learn from what John Treacy did right. He didn’t give up, and pushed for the finish line like it was his only chance at winning. Treacy had years of long-distance practice. The same goes for our economy. A long grind is required to build up its base before we can win and celebrate. And Ovett did not blame anyone for his loss. We play the blame game. Everyone else, right from China and the US to ‘greedy corporates’, seems to be responsible for our failures.
We have lowered absolute poverty levels and had technology-based successes like Aadhaar and digital access to public services. But there are no short cuts to good quality and adequate healthcare and education services. We must remain optimistic but stay firmly away from the optimism bias.
In the end, it is not about how we start, but how we finish. The disastrous second wave of covid and our inability to manage it is a ghastly reminder of this fact.