Forest Rights

June 30, 2021

Syllabus– General Studies 2 (Governance)

Issues relating to quality of life: livelihood, poverty, hunger, disease and social inclusiveness.

Context

Recently PM Modi in an address to the UN High-Level Dialogue on Desertification, Land Degradation and Drought, reiterated that India was on track to achieve land degradation neutrality by 2030.
He cited the example of the Banni grassland in Gujarat where the region’s highly degraded lands were being restored and the livelihoods of pastoralists supported using what he termed a “novel approach.”

About Banni grassland:

One of Asia’s largest tropical grasslands, Banni is home to great biological diversity and is the lifeline of its pastoralist communities.
However, climate change and the invasion by Prosopis juliflora (a species that covers nearly 54 per cent of the grassland) have severely impacted its unique ecology.
A study conducted earlier this year recognises that unless action is taken, Banni grassland is headed for severe fodder scarcity.
This is precisely what the Banni’s pastoralist communities (Maldharis) have been doing for the past few years.
They uproot Prosopis in the pre-monsoon period and when it rains, the native grass species’ regenerate from their rootstock.
The Forest Rights Act (FRA), 2006, Adivasis and other traditional forest-dwelling communities, including pastoralists, are legally empowered to decide on the management and restoration of their community forest resources (CFR) and stop any activity that adversely impacts biodiversity or the local ecology.

Furthermore:

Today (similar to the Banni grasslands) our forests are grappling with degradation, an important contributor to GHG emissions.
- More than 40 per cent of the forest cover is open, often degraded.
- India has committed to restore 26 million hectares of degraded forests and lands by 2030 under the Bonn challenge.
- As part of its Nationally Determined Contribution under the Paris Agreement, it has also targeted creating an additional carbon sink of 2.5 to 3 billion tonnes by 2030 through additional forest and tree cover.

Forest restoration is important because:

Forest restoration is an important climate mitigation strategy.
Beyond carbon sequestration, its benefits include biodiversity conservation and sustainable development.
India’s potential to remove carbon through forest restoration is among the highest in the Global South as per a 2020 study published in Nature, Ecology and Evolution.
At 123.3 million, India also has the greatest number of people living near areas with forest restoration opportunities (within 8km).

Concerns:

The social forestry in the 1970s, tree growers’ cooperative societies in the 1980s, Joint Forest Management in the 1990s or the National Afforestation Programme and Green India Mission in the last two decades, studies have found them to have limited restoration benefits.
- These initiatives have drawn criticism for:
  - Paying little attention to the land and forest tenure of local communities,
  - Failing to incorporate traditional ecological knowledge, and
  - Not assisting communities to receive the opportunities they desire from restoration.
There are several cases of Community Forest Resources (CFR) rights enabling successful ecological restoration of forests, biodiversity conservation and food and livelihood security.
- The recognition of these rights, however, has happened at an extremely slow pace.
- Less than 5 per cent of the total potential area has been brought under CFR.
In Banni too, title deeds formally recognising the CFR rights of the pastoralists are yet to be issued. Institutional support for CFR remains minimal.

Way Forward:

To recognise and support CFR rights.
- By assigning rights to protect, manage and restore around 40 million hectare of forests to village-level democratic institutions, Community Forest Resources (CFR) rights under FRA tackle these issues.
- Strong, peer-reviewed evidence from across the world shows that community forests with legally recognised rights are healthier and associated with lower deforestation rates, higher carbon storage and biodiversity compared to other forests.
In its 2019 Special Report on Climate Change and Land, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change also noted that land titling and recognition programmes, particularly those that authorize and respect indigenous and communal tenure, can lead to improved management of forests, including for carbon storage.

Global attention is on ecosystem restoration — the United Nations theme for the decade. India’s restoration commitments are amongst the most ambitious in the world. Its potential to benefit from forest restoration is also among the highest. It also has a legal framework (the Forest Rights Act) that facilitates an approach internationally acknowledged as essential for combating climate change. All that is needed now is to recognize and support community forest rights.

Question- Forest Restoration cannot be achieved without strengthening community forest rights. Comment.

Art

Forest Rights