Be Mains Ready

Approach

• Introduce by defining climate change, its consequences and the need to adopt mitigation and adaptation techniques.
• Explain how forests are important tools for climate change mitigation.
• Mention about the current status of India’s forests and efforts to expand the forest area.
• Conclude by mentioning about India’s efforts to achieve Sustainable Development Goals.

Introduction

The rising global temperature fuelled by natural and anthropogenic factors like increasing greenhouse gases leads to climate change. The shifting weather patterns causes frequent floods, erratic rainfall, heat waves, threatens food security, and impacts the entire ecosystem. Hence, there is an urgent need to adopt climate change adaptation and mitigation techniques.

Body

• Climate change mitigation generally involves reductions in human (anthropogenic) emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs). Adaptation techniques are actions taken to manage the eventual (or unavoidable) impacts of climate change, for example by building dikes in response to sea level rise.
• While adaptation techniques are easier to adopt, they cannot be a substitute for mitigation strategies. Climate change cannot be addressed unless its causes are addressed. Hence, climate adaptation needs to be equally accompanied by climate mitigation.
  
  • For example, excessive sand mining and deforestation were among the reasons of Kerala floods in 2018. Mitigation strategies like prohibiting incompatible activities in Ecologically Sensitive Zones (ESZs) should have been adopted.

Forests have an enormous potential in mitigating climate change. Some of the benefits of forests include:

• Forests help stabilize the climate. They regulate ecosystems, protect biodiversity, play an important part in the carbon cycle, support livelihoods, and can help drive sustainable growth.
• They are most effective in carbon sequestration thereby reducing greenhouse effect. Trees and other vegetation fix carbon as part of photosynthesis and soil too holds organic carbon from plants and animals.
• Mangrove forests in coastal areas act as effective barriers to sea waves. They also prevent saltwater intrusion towards the land areas.
• Forests help in watershed protection, prevent soil erosion, and helps in restoration of lakes, marshes and other wetlands.

Way Forward

• To maximize the climate benefits of forests, we must keep forest landscapes intact, manage them more sustainably, and restore the degraded forests.
• As per IUCN, halting the loss and degradation of natural systems and promoting their restoration have the potential to contribute over one-third of the total climate change mitigation required by 2030.
  
  • Restoring 350 million hectares of degraded land in line with the Bonn Challenge could sequester upto 1.7 gigatonnes of CO2 equivalent annually.
• Adequate and predictable finance for reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation in developing countries (REDD+) is needed to achieve the Sustainable Development Goal 13.

Conclusion

India’s ambition of becoming a $5 trillion economy by 2024 should be aligned with its Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) under the Paris Climate deal. India pledged an additional carbon sink of 2.5 to 3 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent through additional forest and tree cover by the year 2030.

The National Mission for Green India as part of the National Action Plan on Climate Change (NAPCC), which envisages restoration of 6 million hectares of degraded forest lands and expanding forest cover from 23% to 33% of India's territory, should be a top priority to mitigate climate change impacts.