Nepal has created one of the most successful community forestry programs in the world. In 2011, Nepal was one of six countries shortlisted to receive the Future Policy Award for best forestry policy.
An interest in protecting the greenery of Nepal was sparked after a World Bank Report presented a grim forecast of deforestation. Partners from all over the world rushed in to save the forest—and it worked. According to the Government Ministry of Forests and Environment, the forest began to grow back at an increasing rate of five percent.
Community Forestry works on the principle of the carbon trade, a concept put into action by the Kyoto Protocol as the threat of climate change raises concerns over carbon dioxide output.
The idea of the carbon trade is that each country has a certain amount of carbon they are allowed to release. The trading comes in when countries who release too much carbon dioxide buy the right to these higher emissions from countries with lower output.
Nepal produced 0.3 metric tons of carbon in 2014, the most recent year measured by the World Bank, while in total the world produced 4.97 metric tons of carbon in 2014. Contrastingly, Qatar alone produced 45.4 tons. Qatar can produce this much carbon, far above the total world production, because not all carbon is released into the atmosphere. Much is absorbed into the ocean and trees of the world.
Batu Krishna Uprety is the former Joint-Secretary and Head of the Climate Change Management Division in Nepal’s then Ministry of Environment. He believes the carbon trade has brought much-needed funding to Nepal to work on sustainable development. However, as research in Nepal progresses, he argues for more exposure of Nepali voices in climate agreements.
“There is a need to have continuous participation in the negotiation processes,” said Uprety. “The objective of the climate change conventions is to stabilize the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gas emissions. So, it’s a global issue.”
Since emissions involve all countries, Uprety pushes for collaborative approaches.
“There is some sort of confusion that since the developed countries have emitted the greenhouse gas so they have to compensate. I don’t think that is appropriate. My understanding is how we can work jointly [to] address the global issues. That is much more important than to charge anybody, any country,” said Uprety.
Locally, he wants to educate the public on their part in emissions through policy and promotion. Despite the low carbon emissions of Nepal, only 0.027 percent of global emissions, the effects of climate change are strongly felt in this part of the world. Snow and glaciers melting in the Himalaya impact water supply, weather disasters like flash flooding, tourism economy and hydropower, which used to supply power throughout Nepal.
“We should make our policy and the legal instrument more climate change friendly and encourage the people to consider the key elements of our activities that emit the greenhouse gases,” said Uprety.
With this awareness, Uprety sees the next step as people making concerted efforts to reduce their emissions. Reduction in emissions combined with an effort to conserve the forests of Nepal will bring the country closer to being carbon neutral.
Forests act as a carbon sink. So, more forest means fewer emissions. Since Nepal is covered in forested area, a main reason Nepal and other partners worked to stop deforestation was because it would insure that these forests would continue to absorb carbon. Due to its expansive forest resources, Nepal makes 1 billion rupees annually through carbon trading.
Forty years later, community forestry is still working to maintain the recovered forest. These efforts have expanded to become more than just planting more trees than are cut down. A community in a forested location is given an area of the forest which they are paid to maintain. This includes planning of tree harvests, planting, guarding and regular meetings. The effects of this project are in two-fold.
“There are two prong objectives. One is biophysical terms and the other one is on socioeconomic terms,” explained Anuj Sharma, Director General of the Community Forestry Division. “If you look at the statistics of forestry it is doing quite well in replenishing greenery…but how far has it contributed to uplift the standard of living of rural people who are residing in and around the forest?”
There are few studies done on the socioeconomic effects of community forestry. With over 20 thousand community forests, those that have been studied have produced different effects. However, Sharma conducted a study on a single forest, where he found that the program reduced poverty by eight percent.
The combination of forest regrowth and a potentially positive social benefit provides good news for the forests of Nepal. But, Sharma explains that a new factor threatens community forestry.
“Despite its success story, community forestry is facing big challenges. Last year there were more than 2.2 thousand forest fires. About 15 to 20 people lost their lives trying to fight with the forest fires,” said Sharma. “There is the challenge of management of those forests. It’s a big challenge, it is quite expensive. We need big forestry equipment; we need safety gear and also gear for fighting forest fires.”
He attributes the cause of forest fires to both natural and man-made causes. Many man-made forest fires start when someone throws a still-lit cigarette on the forest floor.
In addition to forest fires, a decline in available workers challenges community forests.
“I am advocating for more support from the partners in the management of community forests because the youth in the villages have migrated outside the country in search of employment,” said Sharma. “The outmigration of youth has caused lack of workforces in the villages.”
The carbon trade has helped begin the process of sustainable development in Nepal, while community forestry has been massively successful in preserving and regrowing forests. But, there is still much work to be done both nationally and globally to reduce our carbon footprint. As a developing country, Nepal can be a leader in overall sustainable development just as it has been with community forestry.
(Taylor Sienkiewicz is an American journalist currently working with Internship Nepal.)
