Carbon market compensation for reduced deforestation under REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) can help cut global emissions but countries like India are not likely to benefit much from it. Instead, such countries should focus tapping the carbon market through afforestation for which there is a vast scope, asserts international environmental expert Dr Adam J. Daigneault, currently associated with the Deshpande Foundation.

“Under REDD mechanism, communities could sell carbon credits by achieving a lower rate of deforestation to bring it below a baseline. However, in case of India, the rate of deforestation, when compared to global average of over 10 million hectares per year, was very low. The country accounted for about one per cent of the global forest and it was likely to decline in the years to come, he said on the sidelines of the national conference on forestry solutions.

However, he observed, the huge wasteland accounting for almost half the total geographical area, offered huge opportunity to attract funding from international community by taking up afforestation programme in a big way. The country had committed to bring 33 per cent of the area under green cover and at present, it was around 21 per cent only. Afforestation programme had to be carried out keeping in view the main objective of maximising carbon sequestration to bring down the level of emissions, implying that species for planting had to be selected carefully.

Expressing similar views, Steven Hamburg, chief scientist, Environment Defence Fund, USA, said deforestation contributed 15 per cent of the total carbon emissions, making it obvious the need to avoid deforestation for which a premium had to be put on standing forests.

By the same measure, large-scale afforestation would be an effective strategy to deal with climate change.

According to JS Samra, chief executive officer, National Rainfed Areas Authority, so far there were only 10 afforestation projects under the CDM worldwide, out of which two were in India. One of them was in Haryana and other in Karnataka, while one project in HP was under consideration. He advocated an integrated approach to ensure that environmental flows from forests in a watershed would help improving farm productivity and sustain livelihood.