The need for multifunctional land use strategies

Climate change is a global environmental and developmental problem. It poses risks for human and natural systems, which vary across regions and populations. Extreme events such as heat waves, droughts, floods, cyclones and wildfires have revealed the significant vulnerability and exposure of some ecosystems and many human systems to climate variability.

Hence in 1992, countries signed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, an international treaty that acts as a framework for international cooperation to combat climate change. The 2015 Paris Agreement marks the latest step in the evolution of the UN climate change regime.

In response to the Paris Agreement, countries across the globe submitted their post-2020 climate actions called the Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs). India not only submitted its INDCs but also ratified it earlier this year. Keeping in view its developmental agenda, particularly the eradication of poverty coupled with its commitment to following a low carbon path to progress, India’s INDC targets include:

* To reduce the emissions intensity of its GDP by 33% to 35% by 2030.

* To achieve about 40% cumulative electric power installed capacity from non-fossil fuel based energy resources by 2030.

* To create an additional carbon sink of 2.5 to three billion tonnes of CO2 equivalent through additional forest and tree cover by 2030.

Land-based mitigation

India’s INDCs recognise the importance of aggressively restoring forest cover in a manner consistent with supporting livelihoods. Creating an additional carbon sink of 2.5 to three billion tonnes of CO2 through additional forest cover would require average annual carbon sequestration to increase by at least 14% over the next 15 years. With the INDC goals clearly emphasising the importance of land-based mitigation, the need to better manage forests so as to maintain the existing forest cover and in addition, bring in new areas under tree cover, is profound.

Land-based mitigation involves growing trees on wastelands, agricultural lands, degraded forest lands, roadsides and any land that is barren or degraded so as to reclaim the tree cover and in the process, create carbon sinks. As land is a scarce resource, there are multiple demands on it. To understand land available for creation of carbon sinks, it is important to understand the current patterns of land use. The major land uses in India are agriculture, forests, wastelands and infrastructure such as roads and housing.

Currently, 60% of area under agriculture is rainfed. The productivity of these systems is very low with meager returns on investment and labour to the practising farmer. Under such conditions, expansion of area under agriculture will place more pressure on water and other environmental parameters needed for optimum crop growth. This in turn will also increase the climate vulnerability of farmers. Therefore, promoting strategies to increase food production in currently cultivated areas to bridge the yield gap is the key to meeting increased food requirements. This makes available the long term fallow and in some cases, even the current fallow agricultural lands available for growing tree crops, which is popularly termed as agroforestry.

Promoting agroforestry creates multifunctional land use systems that convert traditional food producing land categories into land categories that provide multiple benefits. For instance, growing fruit-yielding trees provides nutrition to the farmers and is also an alternate or additional source of income. Further, conversion of low-productive marginal croplands to tree plantations through agroforestry will help rehabilitate nutrient-depleted cropland soils and promote carbon sequestration. Such tree plantations have also been established to serve as adaptation measures, particularly in rainfed dryland agriculture areas with the fruit or timber trees providing an alternate source of income in case of crop failure.

Another important land category that has been reclaimed over the decades are the wastelands. The area under wastelands in India, despite aggressive land reclamation and greening measures, is about 46 Mha. Various state forest departments are developing tree cover in this area. Thus, all the major land categories could be managed to be multifunctional land use systems that cater to the growing needs of infrastructure and food, create lung spaces that regulate the micro-climate, improve soil quality and are home to a number of flora and fauna. In the case of private land holdings such as agricultural lands, promoting multifunctional land use strategies such as agroforestry will contribute directly to climate mitigation and by creation of alternate sources of income, help farmers tide over crop losses as a result of climate variability, therein contributing to climate change adaptation.

Protection of existing forests and afforestation of degraded ones have been carried out for decades. This will increase and conserve carbon sinks, and therefore mitigate climate change. These activities also help meet the biomass and other requirements of local communities that are dependent on forests. As a result, the forests become multifunctional land use systems. It is therefore possible to have multifunctional land use systems that help achieve developmental and climate change mitigation-adaptation goals synergistically without any compromises.

(The author is researcher, Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru)