Thirty years ago, Nepali farmer Badri Prasad Jangam realized that the once thickly wooded hillside that overlooked his home was turning into a barren slope.[break]
Decades of deforestation had taken their toll, stripping away the topsoil, affecting vital underground water sources, and threatening to bring disaster to a community entirely dependent on farming for its livelihood.
Now the trees are back, thanks to an innovative government scheme that won international plaudits for handing responsibility of the preservation of Nepal’s forests over to the local people.
“No one was taking responsibility for the forest 30 years ago,” the 76-year-old farmer said in Kavre district, 20 kilometers (12 miles) east of the capital Kathmandu. “People were cutting down trees for fuel, and hence the forest got more and more sparse. So we worked as a community to protect it, planting new trees and preventing people from using the forest for firewood.”
In Nepal, successive governments began handing forests over to local communities in the late 1970s in a desperate bid to stem illegal deforestation, which the government lacked in resources to halt.
Three decades on, as a result, the Federation of Community Forestry Users Nepal (FECOFUN) says that around a million hectares (2.5 million acres) of forest previously owned by the government is thriving under the supervision of neighborhood groups.
“State control over the forests was ineffective because the government failed to engage local people in forest governance,” said Bhola Bhattarai, general secretary of FECOFUN. “When its control was handed over to the local people, it made them responsible for their own natural resources.”
Nepal relies on wood for around two-thirds of its energy needs, and the scheme benefits local people by giving them direct control over their principal fuel source.
The replanting of acacia, pine and sal trees also means more forest to absorb carbon dioxide, contributing to the reduction of global warming in a country where climate change is already taking its toll.
Scientists, the latest being Italian experts, say that temperatures in Nepal are rising at a much faster rate than the global average, causing the Himalayan glaciers to melt and form giant lakes that threaten to burst, devastating communities downstream.
Climate change experts also predict that Nepal will experience shorter, more intense bursts of rainfall in the future, increasing the risk of flooding and landslides.
“The forests are critical for addressing climate change,” Nepal’s Environment Minister Thakur Prasad Sharma said. “For poor countries like ours, it’s a low-cost mitigation option to fight the negative impacts of climate change in the form of landslides, floods, and erosion. So the challenge for us today is to synchronize community forestry management with the emerging global climate policy.”
The Nepal government has said it aims to increase the country’s forest cover to 40% from the current level of around 27%.
It also hopes to make money through reforestation, said Krishna Prasad Acharya, head of the government’s REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) Scheme. REDD is a UN mechanism to reduce deforestation, whereby richer countries provide financial incentives to protect forests in poorer nations.
It was expected to be one of the cornerstones of any agreement at the UN Copenhagen climate conference held last week, and could eventually channel tens of billions of dollars a year from rich to poor countries.
“Community forestry is no longer just a local issue. The community-managed forests are becoming an important carbon pool,” said Acharya. “The preservation of forests in order to fight climate change is becoming increasingly urgent.”
How the local people of rural Nepal have managed their own neighborhood “commons” of natural resources was the basis of the treatise by Dr. Elinor Ostrom, Professor of Economics at the University of Indiana, whose very work received the 2009 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. This is but one of the win-win ways in which Nepali villagers have proven themselves to the world in maintaining local ecological balance and nature conservation for the sustainable growth of their respective communities.
To shed more light on the above, Elinor Ostrom was recognized for shedding light on “how community institutions can prevent conflict.” The Nobel Prize in Economics awarded to Dr Ostrom in October brought much-needed recognition to the exemplary works of local communities. She was awarded the world’s most prestigious award “for her analysis of economic governance, especially the commons.”
Prof Ostrom had done extensive research on irrigation systems and community forest management in Nepal, and proved wrong the conventional theory that there were only two options to manage the resources – either the state government, or privatization. Ostrom challenged the orthodoxy through her research of commonly managed fish stock, pastures, woods, lakes, and groundwater basins, and found that the outcomes were better than predicted by standard theories.
Dr Ostrom has thereby challenged the conventional wisdom that common property is poorly managed and should be either regulated by central authorities, or privatized. Based on numerous studies of user-managed initiatives as mentioned above, Ostrom conclusively observed that resource users frequently develop sophisticated mechanisms for decision-making and rule enforcement to handle conflicts of interest, and she characterizes the rules that promote successful outcomes.
That Nepal’s remote villages and rural hinterlands – fortunately away from the prying eyes of the center – provided much of the Nobel Laureate economist’s finding need not, therefore, be overly stressed.
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