India: Carbon forestry
in the pipeline
Carbon forestry projects
made a late start in the CDM market because they are so controversial.
The necessary legal framework, laid out in the Marrakesh accords
of 2001, was agreed only in late 2005 at the Montreal climate
negotiations. So there is little concrete to point to yet.
But carbon forestry
is definitely on the cards for India. The World Bank, forestry
and other private sector interests, academics and the government
are all busy laying plans and calculating wildly different figures
for the carbon credits India could get from trees. In 2003, the
Indian pulp and paper lobby issued a blueprint for ‘Re-Greening
India’ as part of its longstanding campaign to be allowed to lease
‘degraded’ forest land on which to grow industrial plantations.
The possibility of the plantations earning carbon credits was
discussed in detail. A National Environment Policy Draft circulated
by the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) in 2004 meanwhile
confirms a new, ‘liberalised’ environmental policy that promotes
carbon trading and other environmental services trades. The move
towards carbon forestry also chimes with a grandiose existing
plan on the part of the MoEF to bring 30 million hectares of ‘degraded’
forest and other lands under industrial tree and cash crop plantation
by 2020, through a new type of collaboration with the private
sector, state governments and local communities.
Among the scores
of CDM projects being contemplated for India are forestry projects
in Madhya Pradesh and Andhra Pradesh states. Here, an organisation
called Community Forestry International (CFI) has been surveying
opportunities for using trees to soak up carbon. CFI declares
that it helps ‘policy makers, development agencies, NGOs, and
professional foresters create the legal instruments, human resource
capacities, and negotiation processes and methods to support resident
resource managers’ in stabilising and regenerating forests. Its
work in Madhya Pradesh has been supported by the US Agency for
International Development and the US Department of Agriculture’s
Forest Service, and in Andhra Pradesh, by the Climate Change and
Energy Division of Canada’s Department of Foreign Affairs and
International Trade.
CFI suggests that,
in India, the CDM would be a viable income generating activity
for rural indigenous communities. But there are strong reasons
to doubt this. In India, as everywhere else, it’s not abstract
theory, but rather the institutional structure into which CDM
would fit, that provides the key clues to its likely social and
climate outcomes.
Take, for example,
the CDM scheme investigated by CFI that would be sited in Adilabad,
Andhra Pradesh state. CFI saw possibilities of sequestering carbon
by reforesting and afforesting non-forest or ‘degraded’ forest
lands whose carbon content has been depleted by a large and growing
human and cattle population, uncontrolled grazing of cattle in
forests and ‘encroachment’ on and conversion of forest lands for
swidden cultivation.
The best option,
CFI felt, would be to regenerate teak and mixed deciduous forests.
Clonal eucalyptus plantations would, it thought, accumulate carbon
faster, and would have other commercial uses such as timber and
pulp, as well as incremental returns for any interested investor,
but would cost more to establish and maintain, and would be sure
to be condemned by Adivasi communities and activists as a new
form of colonialism.
CFI decided that
the best agencies for taking on forest regeneration would be women’s
self-help groups (SHGs). SHGs were set up by the state-level Inter-Tribal
Development Agency during the 1990s as a mechanism for improving
the finances of households through micro-credit schemes and capacity-building,
as well as linking households with financial institutions and
government authorities. CFI says that they’re much more dynamic,
accountable and transparent than other local institutions, such
as forest protection committees, which are viewed as inefficient,
untransparent, untrustworthy, and troubled in their relationship
with the Forest Department.
It may sound perfect.
Except that it’s hard to see how the virtues of the women’s self-help
groups could work for the carbon economy. For one thing, CFI states
that only if the SHGs come together in a federation would carbon
offset forestry projects be financially viable, given the high
transaction costs involved in preparing and carrying them out.
Yet it does not explain how such a federation could come about
in rural communities, nor how SHGs could become involved in CDM
projects and link themselves to the carbon market. Nor does it
mention that SHGs currently work in relative isolation from the
Panchayat Raj institutions (the ultimate village-level formal
self-governing authority in rural India), the Forest Department
and local forest protection committees.
It could be argued
that there’s nothing to worry about yet and maybe we can just
learn as we go along. But the problem is that the mere fact that
studies like CFI’s are being carried out already gives legitimacy
to the idea of carbon offsets in the South. Few outsiders will
notice that the conclusions are suspect.
Excerpted and adapted
from: “Carbon Trading: A Critical Conversation on Climate Change,
Privatisation and Power”, Dag Hammarskjold Foundation, Durban
Group for Climate Justice, and The Corner House, available for
download at http://www.dhf.uu.se
