Fri. Mar 29th, 2024

I wonder what has remained the same for years. With the development, not only have come better living standards, chances of livelihoods of survival but this has not remained true for many, and almost none, in the last few years.

Many lives are being lost, economies standing on the brink of collapse, health infrastructure shaken to the core and weather patterns being deceptive by all means, and the intellectuals on the planet could only be hopeful about a set of finite solutions for the climate crisis.

Cutting down fossils, curbing greenhouse gas emissions, planting more trees and avoiding deforestation etc., have been the promoted ones. However, cracks have just begun to appear in these efforts.

Amidst the tree-planting frenzy in trend everywhere, there are hardly any guidelines followed in India while attempting afforestation as well as reforestation under Compensatory Afforestation Fund Management and Planning Authority (CAMPA).

Be it the Ethiopia that announced to plant more than 350 million trees or the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh that planted 220 million trees in one go.

Even the world’s inspirational World Economic Forum has pledged and asserted that “trees and forests are a critical part of the solution to the climate crisis and biodiversity collapse. That’s why we aim to mobilize, connect, and empower the global reforestation community to conserve, restore and grow one trillion trees by 2030.”

Afterall, who doesn’t like trees?

Although this is ostensibly an effective and easy way to reverse the environmental degradation but as per a Forest Engineer: “A good forest-restoration project, she says, must recreate a forest ecosystem where it was a forest before, a process also called reforestation. But afforestation, or planting a new forest in an area where there was no forest to begin with, can often be problematic”.

“Always be suspicious of such big claims. It’s taken for granted that tree planting is good. But look at what they’re planting, where they’re planting”, warns a Researcher.

It remains ironic that conserving an existing patch of forests isn’t fun anymore as compared to planting new trees elsewhere, normally on the city’s outskirts where there are hardly any needy souls to breathe.

There are series of afforestation projects that failed in the most spectacular ways. In just an hour of the record planting drive, boasting of the largest number of seedlings planted in shortest time ever, a Filipino island of Luzon swallowed over a million mangrove seedlings under its mud.

And hence after even a decade, unlike the anticipations there is no evidence of mangroves with only 2 percent of those to have survived: rest of these either died or washed away.

A field Researcher explained to BBC: “Even at a survival rate of 50%, we should have seen more than 20 million hectares of trees and forests. But that hasn’t happened – the data does not show that addition.”

Source: BBC

Even in India, there is no proof of any government-led afforestation drives to have increased inherent Forest cover, aided the carbon sequestration or helped a community find better forms of livelihood.

Another botched plan was uncovered when an extensive study conducted by the Florida State University in Himachal Pradesh recorded an ecological damage and reported with Yale: “Typically, tree species growing on common land that were useful to local people for animal fodder and firewood had been replaced by plantations of fast-growing but less useful trees, often fenced off from local communities”.

Consequently, planting in the name of environmental love, without surveying, mapping (both ecological and geographical) and planning has just been a sink for our anxieties, a tool of greenwashing for the government and has negatively impacted the surroundings, lest alone achieving any good.

Factors responsible for such failed attempts vary from place to place, yet get paired with similarities like planting only a single species that become invasive to others in its vicinity by changing the chemical properties of the soil, fall prey to certain diseases; changing climate or simply a lack of post-planting care like watering, for one.

What are these Phantom Forests?

Phantom forests are the remnants of those tree planting drives those have either failed miserably or did not achieve whatever they intended to, say curbing Deforestation.

This skews the statistics when there is presupposed absorption of carbon merely by seeding forests and recording them as carbon credits, which may further be fetched by the Corporate houses in order to fulfil their own promises to achieve ‘net-zero’ emissions or the calculation of forest power to adapt to Climate change and the credibility of their carbon credits.

Do we have some authority that controls and certifies the available carbon credits generated in the name of forests in India?

These are spread across hundreds of markets operating internationally for trading in these offsets and have “essentially no regulatory requirements and operate instead on loose private standards”, as described by an expert.

One of the major such certifier in the US is California Air Resources Board (CARB) that is running out of buffer carbon kept aside to offset any potential mishap, for instance 95 percent of this ‘categorical’ wildfire buffer has been utilized by mere 6 wildfires in the region.

Are all lands available for one of a kind plantation drive?

An Atlas of Forest Landscape Restoration Opportunities prepared by the World Resources Institute and the IUCN could identify a sizeable 2 billion hectares of land that could be used for potential forest restoration programme.

But an alternative survey by a group of independent researchers have pointed out certain inadequacies like nearly 900 million hectares of the classified grassy biomes have been taken under the “deforested” or “degraded.”

Consequently, the arguments remain for what lies in best chances: “Allowing nature to choose which species predominate? Or allowing for local adaptation and higher functional diversity?”

Maybe the best for now is to either plant the right tree variety at the right place or do not affect nature anymore by our inconsistent themes, it has survived even worse in alienation.

The demand for food and agricultural land has driven an alteration of land-use patterns and deforestation. Restoration has already suffered a blowback in many places. Therefore, researchers across the globe are working hard on how to exactly re-assert the ecological health of any degraded land while reaping the socio-economic benefits from sustainable land management.

The ecosystem services can now come in the picture, as their intensification has always come to help humanity in need.

By Alaina Ali Beg

I am a lover of all arts and therefore can dream myself in all places where the World takes me. I am an avid animal lover and firmly believes that Nature is the true sorcerer.

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