Dr Asangba Tzudir
After Carbon Credit comes the next big thing for Nagaland. Recently, the World Bank's board of executive directors approved a major 225.5 million dollar initiative, supporting over seven lakh people in managing forest landscapes and improving forest value chains across more than 400 villages in Tripura and Nagaland. The project aims to restore over 100,000 hectares of forest in the Indian states of Tripura and Nagaland. Named as ELEMENT (Enhancing Landscape and Ecosystem Management), is going to benefit over 700,000 people across 400 villages in the two northeastern states in the country.
This comes at a time when Nagaland’s forest cover has been on the decline, and this project will give primary focus on conservation and restoration of forests, and in doing so enhance landscape-based value chains, and also strengthen soil conservation and water availability. On the whole it is going to mitigate climate change by reducing Carbon emission. Forest preservation and restoration efforts come directly linked with Carbon Credits and therefore, this project is not only going to contribute to environmental conservation efforts but will also provide significant economic opportunities towards economic growth and social well-being of the region.
While the project will promote sustainable forest management practices, including the cultivation of high-value trees like agarwood and green gold bamboo. It will also contribute to the development of nature and ecosystem tourism which is going to provide job opportunities for the local people, especially youth and women. This project will automatically provide a framework that will give a very holistic landscape where the land and forest will extend beyond traditional forest areas to include ‘economic forest farmlands’. Such an integration also boosted by the land ownership system will not only serve as an economic and livelihood activity but will go a long way in improving the climatic conditions for livelihood sustainability.
In 2019, more than 11,000 scientists from around the world declared a ‘climate emergency’ and gave a stark warning that the world’s people will face “untold suffering due to the climate crisis” unless there are major transformations to global society. The warning added, that in order “to secure a sustainable future, we must change how we live” which entail major transformations in the ways our global society functions and interacts with natural ecosystems. Looking at the climatic crisis today, it has not only arrived but it is said to be accelerating at a very fast pace, and the severity of which was not earlier anticipated. While it continues to threaten humanity and livelihood, the only way out is by restoring and rebuilding the natural ecosystems.
Some measures include population growth and the need to keep a check on the growth rate, leaving fossil fuels in the ground, halting forest destruction and cutting down on meat eating. This climate emergency declaration comes after the Paris Agreement which is a legally binding international treaty on climate change that was adopted by 196 Parties at the UN Climate Change Conference (COP21) in Paris, France, on 12 December 2015. It entered into force on 4 November 2016 with the larger goal to bring down the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels” and pursue efforts “to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.” While these are the larger environmental concerns, it calls for collective effort from each and every individual.
In context, the forest preservation and restoration project approved by the World Bank calls for proper education at the grassroots and which is integral to the process of conserving and restoring forest in Nagaland and thereby converting into a livelihood activity besides the larger impact on the environment’s sustainability.
(Dr Asangba Tzudir writes guest editorials for The Morung Express. Comments can be mailed to asangtz@gmail.com)
