Expanding urban and rural green cover and trees in agroforestry is also important for India's carbon sink. Credit: Chandan Khanna/AFP/Getty Images
India needs a raft of strategies beyond planting trees to meet its climate commitments, researchers says. The country has pledged to expand forest cover to absorb an additional three billion tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by 2030.
Using a simulation model called Sustainable Alternative Futures for India (SAFARI), researchers at the Center for Study of Science, Technology and Policy (CSTEP) in Bengaluru conclude that India should include four strategies to harness its full carbon sequestration potential — reduce deforestation, minimize degradation of green cover, restore degraded forest land, and create new forests.
The model shows that these strategies in tandem can help absorb an additional 2.5 to 3 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide by 2030, a goal India committed to in the climate action plan of 2022, following the Paris Agreement of 2015.
CSTEP analyst Aparna Sundaresan says these interventions should define India’s long-term forest management and expansion. “We also need to look at trees outside forests, in urban and rural spaces and on land used for different purposes, such as agriculture,” she says.
Felling trees for developmental projects like large-scale housing may be difficult to stop, given the country’s industrial and urban growth, says Sundaresan.
Unscientific tree planting can derail carbon sink commitment
India’s Compensatory Afforestation Fund Management and Planning Authority (CAMPA) Act mandates that developmental work on forest land must be compensated by planting trees on non-forest land of equal size or by improving degraded forest land of double the size. “But new plants cannot compensate for the loss of carbon stocks and other ecosystem services provided by old forests in a realistic time frame,” says Gopala Areendran at WWF-India.
Insufficient guidance on suitable sites for restoration has led to forest managers planting the wrong species or putting trees in unsuitable areas, unbalancing ecosystems and wasting budgets. In Himachal Pradesh, for instance, nearly 40% of foresting budget was spent in places with decent tree cover and only 14.1% focused on sparsely covered areas.
Introducing non-native tree species into ecosystems reverses climate adaptation and biodiversity benefits, Areendran says. The cultivation of invasive Conocarpus species in afforestation projects was recently banned in two Indian states.
A warming planet and changes in precipitation are likely to affect the ability of forests to sink carbon, says T. Jayaraman at M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation. Climate change can also reshape forests, especially where the species cannot shift or move. In the medium to long term, India’s forest biomes are predicted to be vulnerable to climate change, and the bulk of decarbonization will have to come from a reduction in industrial emissions, Jayaraman says.
Another way to protect carbon sinks is by conserving mangrove forests, coral reefs, tidal marshes, and seagrasses, according to Areendran.
