SC order on evicting forest dwellers: Protecting indigenous communities’ rights is key in fight against climate change
FirstpostSeveral tribal communities in India protect forests, based on their self-perception of these areas being under their custodianship. In this light, the Supreme Court’s 13 February order that threatens to evict over 10 lakh forest dwellers is not just a major land rights crisis, but also a big blow to the country’s effort to mitigate climate change, and a direct contrast to India’s commitment to protect its forests as part of its 2005 Paris Agreement, experts say. In the Paris Agreement, along with reducing greenhouse gas emission intensity of the country’s GDP by 33 to 35 percent below 2005 levels by 2030, and committing to ensure that 40 percent of power capacity will be from non-fuel sources, India also committed to create an ‘carbon sink’ of 2.5 to 3 billion tonnes of CO2 equivalent through additional forest and tree cover by 2030. Across the world, indigenous communities have legal or official rights to at least 513 million hectares of forests — which is about one-eighth of the world’s total forest cover. “When indigenous people and local communities have no or weak legal rights, their forests tend to be vulnerable to deforestation and thus become the source of carbon dioxide emissions,” the report found out.