States offer up thousands of hectares of ‘degraded’ forest land for green credits

States offer up thousands of hectares of ‘degraded’ forest land for green credits

Subject: Schemes

Section: Environment

Context:

• Ten states have identified around 3,853 hectares of degraded forest land for the Green Credit Programme (GCP), with Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh contributing up to 40% of this land.

Green Credit Programme:

• It was first announced by the Union Finance Minister in the 2023-24 budget to leverage a competitive market-based approach and incentivise voluntary environmental actions of various stakeholders.
• Green Credit is an incentive that individuals, farmer-producer organisations (FPO), industries, and rural and urban local bodies, among other stakeholders, will be able to earn for environment-positive actions.
• By ‘green credit’, the government means a singular unit of an incentive provided for a specified activity, delivering a positive impact on the environment.
• Apart from incentivising individual/community behaviour, the Green Credit Programme will encourage private sector industries and companies as well as other entities to meet their existing obligations, stemming from other legal frameworks, by taking actions which are able to converge with activities relevant to generating or buying green credits.
• The activities include:
  • Tree plantation, Water, Sustainable agriculture, Waste management, Air pollution reduction, Mangrove conservation and restoration, Ecomark, Sustainable building and infrastructure.
• The Indian Council of Forestry Research and Education shall be the administrator of the programme. The institute will develop guidelines, processes and procedures for the implementation of the programme and develop methodologies and standards, registration process and associated measurement, reporting and verification mechanisms.
• The green credits will be tradable and those earning it will be able to put these credits up for sale on a proposed domestic market platform.
• Concern include:
  • Greenwashing
  • Maintenance and monitoring challenges
  • Fraud in the utility of resources

Guidelines for implementation of the Green Credit Programme (GCP):

• The GCP allows entities to finance afforestation on designated lands, with state forest departments executing the planting.
• Two years post-planting, the International Council of Forestry Research and Education (ICFRE) will evaluate the efforts, and each tree could translate into one ‘green credit’.
• Companies that have cleared forest land for development can use these credits to meet their compensatory afforestation obligations.

Compensatory afforestation:

• Industries or institutions clearing forest land for non-forestry purposes must provide equivalent non-forest land for afforestation, or double the area in degraded forest land if non-forest land isn’t available.
• They are also required to compensate for the forest ecosystem’s loss, paying for the ‘net present value’ lost due to land diversion.
• States like Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh face challenges in finding contiguous non-forest land for compensatory afforestation, often due to historical land diversion for mining.
• The Compensatory Afforestation Fund, filled with compensation money from companies, remains largely unspent due to the scarcity of suitable land for forest regeneration.

Creating new land banks:

• Green credits aim to promote private investment in afforestation, aligning with PM Narendra Modi’s calls for sustainable lifestyles and valuing activities like tree planting.
• Experts caution against assigning a monetary value to green credits, as linking them to compensatory afforestation could lead to creating land banks prone to commercial exploitation.
• This could paradoxically increase forest land diversion, contradicting the goal of compensatory afforestation laws designed to discourage using forest land for commercial purposes.

Source: TH