The 14th Conference of Parties (COP14) of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) was held in Greater Noida, Uttar Pradesh.
India has committed to restore 26 million hectares of degraded land by 2030.
What is the rationale?
Climate-change-induced extreme weather events have become alarmingly common.
India’s commitment reflects a growing realisation of this fact.
India will restore 26 million hectares of degraded land by 2030, more than its earlier target of 21 million hectares.
In the afforestation process, India is set to create a carbon sink of close to 3 billion metric tonnes through additional tree cover.
How significant is afforestation?
The financial and human costs of climate-related calamities can no longer be confined to the margins of policymaking.
The policy push to solar power and the efforts to shift to EVs must count as notable steps to reduce carbon emissions.
However, afforestation is what matters the most.
This is because, soil degradation accounts for more emissions than any other activity.
It is due to the fact that the soil stores three times the amount of carbon as the atmosphere.
Carbon sequestration, or the creation of carbon sinks, therefore must assume centre-stage.
An intensive afforestation programme requires adoption of the right forestry practices, and above all, a good amount of money.
Why have carbon credit market failed?
‘Carbon credit markets’ have failed to generate funds for the developing world.
The world moved from a regime of mandatory commitments on the part of the industrialised countries under the 1997 Kyoto Protocol to voluntary ones under the 2015 Paris accord.
Around the same time, it also impacted the shift towards clean development engineered by ‘carbon credits’ or Carbon Emission Reduction certificates.
These certificates were bought by EU countries for funding clean projects in the developing world.
They also worked as a sort of fine for not meeting emission targets.
But since these certificates were often underpriced and the wrong projects identified, neither party met their obligations.
After the Paris pact, emission reduction targets became vague, and so, this seriously disturbed the working of carbon credits market.
Evidently, as the UNEP report on ‘emissions gap’ observes, global emissions peaked in 2017 after 3 years of stagnation.
The REDD+ initiative has also failed due to faulty carbon pricing and the poor negotiating rights of traditional communities.
[REDD+ - Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation plus conservation, sustainable management of forests, and enhancement of forest carbon stocks]
What lies ahead?
A multilateral body just for funding green initiatives must be set up.
The best recourse for India is to leverage a corpus set up under the initiative of the Supreme Court in 2002 - the Compensatory Afforestation Management and Planning Authority (CAMPA).
Under this, projects in forest areas have to compensate for the forest cover destroyed by depositing a value in the CAMPA corpus.
This, in turn, will be used for forestry programmes.
