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Restoration of Degraded Land - UNCCD

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September 10, 2019

Why in news?

  • 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.

 

Source: Business Line

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