The Indian Council of Forestry Research and Education will now work to integrate the practical approaches to forest landscape restoration (FLR) for regaining ecological integrity and enhancing human well-being in the forested and degraded landscapes of the country.
ICFRE director general VK Bahuguna said that this decision was taken following the signing of a bipartite agreement between the Government of India and the United Kingdom Forestry Commission at Edinburgh on September 6. The agreement was signed by the UKFC director general Tim Rollinson, DG (Forests) and Special Secretary, MoEF, Government of India, PJ Dilip Kumar, and the ICFRE DG during the visit of a high-level delegation of the Government of India to the UK from September 3 to 9.
The collaborative project will attempt to map and assess potential FLR sites in different States of India and linking of other assessments being carried out in other countries under the umbrella of Global Partnership on Forest Landscape Restoration (GPFLR), founded by UK in the year 2002. The collaborative project conceives a draft Stakeholders Participatory Spatial Planning and Learning Platform (SPLP) and creation of a National Learning Network.
The Indian and UK officials also decided to initiate a 3-5 year long bigger umbrella project in collaboration with UKFC and to be funded by DFID, with elements of evaluation of ecosystem services that help alleviate poverty and are influenced by FLR and Sustainable Forest Management (SFM).
The project would also address impact of climate change, appropriate FLR based mitigation and adaptation strategies and attempt to facilitate involvement of community through JFM platform to address livelihood issues. Officials also discussed the proposal for establishing an International Centre for Sustainable Development to address policy issues related to climate change, livelihood, ecosystem services and forest certification.
This project is continuation of the ongoing ICFRE-UK FLR started last year at ICFRE, wherein the potential FLR sites in three States of India including Uttarakhand, Madhya Pradesh and Odisha were identified and the ecological and socio-economic parameters of this initiative mapped for refining appropriate methodologies for up scaling and application in other States of India.
The summary report of UK-India FLR project was also released on the occasion.
