By Joydeep Gupta/Mongabay
“We look after our forests, we save them, because they are our home,” Gaura Devi of the Chipko movement fame had once said. “We get fuel, fodder and some food from the forest, we get herbs when someone falls ill, but we don’t have any [legal] paper to save us if the forest department refuses to let us in or complains to the police that we are stealing.” This is the problem the Global Environment Facility (GEF) aims to solve with its Conservation of Biodiversity, its Sustainable Use, Fair and Equitable Sharing of Benefits in India (CONSERVE) project in three states — Uttarakhand, Nagaland and Tripura.
The National Biodiversity Authority (NBA) will carry out the project that was approved at the May 30-June 6 GEF assembly in Samarkand, Uzbekistan. GEF will give a $12.38 million grant for the project; the World Bank will lend $30 million.
Speaking to Mongabay-India on the sidelines of the assembly, Benjamin Singer, senior biodiversity specialist, Global Biodiversity Framework Fund (GBFF) and the GEF official looking after the project, said, “Community-managed forests have to be safeguarded. Communities around the world are doing it and have always done it. We want to design this better in full consultation with the communities themselves. And we want to give them an incentive to do what they are doing.” GBFF was set up to implement the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (UNCBD).
The project plan states that in around 5,000 hectares spread across the three states, community-managed forests, including sacred groves and buffer zones around forest areas managed by the government, will be identified, mapped and managed in “direct engagement” with over 25,000 people, at least half of them women. The project document says state biodiversity authorities will co-design the management plan with village councils. “Communities will not just be consulted, they will co-author the rules of governance for their landscapes.”
This project — with the World Bank and United Nations Development Programme as implementing partners along with NBA — is expected to deal with another long-standing dispute: commercial firms use the traditional knowledge of communities to gather herbs and then make medicines and cosmetics, without the communities getting any money for it.
There is a mechanism called Access and Benefit Sharing (ABS) under the UNCBD to ensure firms pay. By November 2025, the NBA had distributed ?4.3 million to various local organisations under this mechanism. This GEF project says it will ensure at least 40% of this money goes to women or women-led groups.
Building a national biodiversity map
The project is ambitious at a macro level. The document says it will “pilot the full recognition process for community-managed areas and produce a replication toolkit that other Indian states can use once national guidelines are officially released.”
It also plans to amalgamate the databases of government-run and autonomous botanical, zoological and wildlife institutions into a single national biodiversity map. Singer said India would be able to use its famed IT capacity to do this. He hoped the map would become a tool that can be used whenever and wherever development or infrastructure projects are planned in the future.
The climate connect
If all that works out, this project will also be able to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and absorb GHGs by an estimated 12 million metric tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent over 20 years, the GEF has claimed.
However, its own review committee has noted that the project has not paid sufficient attention to climate change impacts on these forests. It wrote, “It will be important to include a more detailed consideration of climate change and its interaction with other drivers.” The project is meant to be carried out in forests that are becoming drier in summers due to heightened monsoon vagaries, so the number and intensity of wildfires are increasing. In some parts of Uttarakhand, women’s groups have started initiatives to fight wildfires. There is no mention of this in the project plan.
GEF does have other ambitions. It hopes the project will help connect markets to communities living around forests and preparing handicrafts from the materials they gather. This will be piloted, with a target of mobilising at least $2 million.
This article is republished from Mongabay under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article here.