Forestry and Environment

Abstract

There have been growing concerns in Nepal and other South Asian less developed countries (LDCs) with the acceleration of global environment changes due to continuing increases in greenhouse gas emissions and accelerated deforestation rates. Available literature on forestry’s dilemmas reveals that, except for the extreme temperature, moisture, and nutrient deficient situations, vegetation can (a) efficiently conserve elevated atmospheric carbon; (b) use the absorbed carbon in biomass production through the process of photosynthesis; and (c) if properly managed, can help to boost gross and net primary productivity of an ecosystem while mitigating global climate change. Within Nepal, conservationists, scientists, and administrators have expressed growing concerns about the rapid deterioration of the Himalayan environment because of deforestation, landslide increases, and large-scale downstream flooding. These processes are frequently linked together into a wide-ranging cause-and-effect drama of the Himalayan Degradation. Effective management of forest resources is considered one of the solutions to ameliorating environmental and land degradations. Recent Nepal’s government statistics show that Nepal’s total forest area has increased from 29 to 44%; however, forests are constantly facing new socio-environmental pressures from the growing population and from bulldozer-based development. Further complicating this issue, the statistics on Nepal’s forests have been disputed by various scholars. Nonetheless, through a set of policies, Nepal has been actively involved in the REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation, Plus Related Pro-forest Activities) programs since 2009 involving local communities to conserve and manage existing forests and creating new forest on non-forested lands through afforestation programs. If applied effectively, the full range of REDD+ activities can turn forests from a source of global warming emissions into a counteracting “sink.” REDD+’s incentives in the form of carbon fund allocations and can act as a development catalyzer, involving many communities in greening the denuded lands of Nepal while also generating employment opportunities at local grass-root levels. Government agencies, many private organizations, religious institutions, and over 22,266 community forestry user groups have been involved in the management of Nepal’s forests, and their activities are contributing to the reduction of carbon emissions through forest conservation as well as deriving economic benefits to local communities.Though mountainous Nepal contributes merely 0.027% of the total global greenhouse gas emissions, it unwillingly exports top fertile soils along the rivers flowing down steep to very steep gradients. Sedimentation from Nepal’s Himalayan region often clogs rivers and canals along the Indo-Gangetic belt and causes massive floods in the Indian state of Bihar before draining into the Bay of Bengal. Participatory natural resource management and the ecosystem services concept proposed in this chapter—which have been instrumental across many South Asian, European, and North American countries in claiming degraded lands and mutually benefitting the upstream and downstream communities—could be instrumental in the restoration and management of degraded ecosystems in various parts of Nepal. We propose such a concept to solve the ongoing problems of land degradation of the Churia Range of Nepal. We have divided the entire Churia and corresponding Tarai-Madhesh regions into 91 watersheds and recast them as the operational service providing units (SPUs) for handling this deforestation dilemma. There are several sub-SPUs within SPUs, serving local communities. It is hoped that with the delineation of SPUs and sub-SPUs, it will be possible to make individual households living within the watersheds responsible for managing their lands and forest resources of their territories and creating an environment of communalism where both upstream and downstream communities will benefit in this “win-win” environmental scenario. The woodlots and vegetated areas that the households living within SPU and sub-SPUs manage will provide a wide range of ecosystem services to the downstream communities. In turn, the upstream communities will benefit from the downstream communities and REDD+’s incentives programs while also ameliorating the global climate from carbon sequestration. The upstream communities benefit from grant money or development funds granted from the government. The government might increase nominal revenue on the farmlands of downstream communities for the regulated ecosystem services from upstream communities. Revenues paid to the government by the downstream communities can be redirected as the government grants money to upstream communities to further improve the ecosystem services to the downstream communities. Properly identifying, assessing, and valuing natural resources and ecosystem services within SPUs and sub-SPUs will help in the management of natural resources in various ways. One such approach proposed here is the prioritization of SPU’s management options by assessing the trade-offs in ecosystem services and developing resilient communities who will eventually contribute to the sustainable management of available resources while contributing to the mitigation of global climate changes. Different computer-based models along with this chapter will help local communities to assess their benefits from each SPU or sub-SPU and change their course of actions in the future.