Forests Move Center Stage in India’s Climate Plan

0India, the world’s third-largest polluter, is planning to balance development with environment protection as it tackles climate change.

India is to put forests at the center of its plans to mitigate the worst effects of climate change by encouraging more “green cover” and reducing the carbon intensity of its development.

India comes behind China and the United States in the most polluting countries’ list and defends its record by saying that emissions per capita are far below most developed countries’, and its priority is still to lift millions of citizens out of poverty.

However, the country has 13 of the 20 most-polluted cities on the planet, according to the World Health Organisation, and for that reason alone it needs to cut down on fossil fuel use.

The government is expected to announce its long-awaited national plan to reduce emissions ahead of the 1 October deadline set by the United Nations.  These plans, known in UN jargon as Intended Nationally Determined  Contributions (INDCs), must be produced by all countries so that scientists can assess whether their sum total is enough to keep the world from overheating by 2°C – the limit agreed by politicians to prevent dangerous climate change.

Promising a “new prescription” from India to reduce greenhouse gases, Prakash Javadekar, India’s minister for environment, forests and climate change, said the country’s plans would go ahead whatever the outcome of the UN’s climate talks.

He expressed disappointment that the recent preparatory talks in Bonn had not made more progress ahead of the summit in Paris in December which is designed to produce an international agreement to reduce world emissions beyond 2020.

Dual strategy
He said: “We want to clean our air, our water, our environment, so we are addressing a challenge which takes care of our climate change mitigation and adaptation measures as well.

“India has already started reducing emission intensity, reducing the energy intensity of development, increasing energy efficiency and also increasing the forest cover (to take more carbon out of the atmosphere).  We are also having more renewables.”

One of the important subsidiary agreements on the agenda of the climate talks is about preserving the world’s forests, and India is putting great emphasis on this.  Called REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation), it allows for replanting existing forests and preserving them from logging to be counted as part of a country’s efforts to reduce its emissions.

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