With growing concern about climate change impacts and actions across the Himalayas over the past few years, much attention has been directed towards securing and sustaining food, water, livelihoods, and energy for the millions of people who depend on the mountain ecosystem goods and services, both upstream and downstream, rich and poor alike. Emerging climate action plans in the region increasingly stress the paramount role of forests in adapting to and mitigating the impacts of climate change.
This is logical, since for the Himalayan populations, forests are a source of life, livelihoods, and cultural identity; pillars for sustaining agriculture and local economy; and ecological ‘factories’ producing invaluable goods and services. Forests account for one-fourth (more than 1 million square kilometer) of the land use in Hindu-Kush Himalayas (HKH). Their significance is greatly magnified if we consider their integration with other key ecosystems such as rangelands (which covers over 50 percent of the region’s land area).
Despite their immense environmental, socioeconomic, and cultural value, Himalayan forest ecosystems have, over the years, degraded and depleted, mainly as a result of human activities such as clearing of land for agriculture, use of forests as grazing grounds, human settlement, commercial logging, mining, hydropower projects, military activities, mass tourism, massive infrastructure development, and illegal encroachment. Of the eight HKH countries (Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, China, India, Myanmar, Nepal, and Pakistan), only Bhutan, China, and India have stabilized their loss of forest cover, largely through forest plantation activities in the last two countries. Barring Bhutan—which has low human population and therefore the region’s least pressure on forests—the countries in the region have not matched swelling basic human needs with sustainable forest management to secure and sustain the provisioning and environment-regulating services provided by forests.
Among the key public resources, forests are the most controlled lands in the region in terms of State authority. The centralized forest governance systems that predominated until the 1980s generally treated forests as revenue sources and alienated authentic forest users from traditional access to forest resources. The high deforestation and forest degradation rates indicated that these systems were not delivering.
The focus in the forest sector since the 1990s has been on comprehensive research on key regional issues such as pro-poor and inclusive forest policies, institutional arrangements and management approaches; harnessing of knowledge on access and benefit sharing; and creation and building of advocacy networks and institutional arrangements for sustainable forest management. In line with debate on and initiatives for re-empowerment of traditional communities, community-based or participatory forest management concepts have been adopted. This approach is also aligned with the global attention to decentralized natural resource management advocated at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1992.
Local empowerment and forest conservation are the twin objectives of sustainable forest management initiatives. Although civil society, researchers, political leaders, and community champions have loudly voiced the urgency of adequately balancing the social, economic, ecological, and climatic values of mountain forests, governance and management deficits have hindered achievement of this balance.
An opportune time to reflect on the role of forest ecosystems in delivering goods and services to millions in an efficient, effective, equitable and sustainable way.
China and India have shown marked progress in plantation forestry, and Nepal has spearheaded participatory forest management regimes which have restored forest cover in its middle hills. However, even here there is no denying that huge donor investments have kept community forestry ticking, and often success has been achieved at the cost of further degradation of State-owned forests and inequitable access for marginalized users.
Recent studies by the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) and other institutions across the region have shown that the potential ecosystem values of forests, including benefits to water, biodiversity, carbon storage and other diverse functions, total trillions of dollars. Climate change has brought an unprecedented challenge to fill gaps on relevant data on forest ecosystems so that targeted adaptation measures can be designed and applied. Therefore we must keep innovating, consolidating knowledge, and communicating it to forums of decision-making on policy and practice. In charting the course for sustainable forest management in an information-savvy world, we need to address knowledge gaps by:
• Contributing to national and regional frameworks of cooperation for good forest governance based on participatory forest management;
• Improving knowledge on valuation of forest ecosystems and interfacing ecosystems such as rangelands, and testing and mainstreaming their role as green avenues of development (e.g., via incentive-based mechanisms for communities rendering sustained forest goods and services including forest carbon and biodiversity; sustained value chains for livelihoods; and sound adaptive management approaches);
• Building a regional repository and forum of knowledge on forest ecosystems in the HKH and facilitating exchange of learning among regional policy and decision makers, researchers and resource managers.
International Mountain Day is an opportune time to highlight the crucial role of forest ecosystems in delivering goods and services to millions in an efficient, effective, equitable and sustainable way. To ensure this role, it is necessary to enhance knowledge on good governance, adaptive forest management, payment for environmental services as a local financing mechanism, and capacity development. Good governance, if achieved, can ensure long-term delivery on local livelihoods and equitable benefits from ecosystem services.
Regarding forest management, it is important that modern conservation, production, and technologies be integrated through the concept of adaptive management. By generating knowledge on conservation technology and energy-related good practices, we can make a major contribution to local climate change adaptation and reduce drudgery for women.
As globalization advances and climate change becomes perceptible, developments beyond a country’s national borders often tend to impact its forests and forestry more than what happens within the country. The collateral effects of regional logging bans, changes in tax structures, incentives to industries, and policies relating to agriculture, economic growth, energy, and trade—as well as climate concerns—demand collective responses. We must deliver on the task of making mountain forests count in the future as the defining land use shaping the resilience of human populations and ecosystems across the Hindu Kush-Himalayan region.
The writer is Team Leader of ICIMOD’s Action Area on Integrated Forest Ecosystem and Watershed Services
rkotru@icimod.org
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