Journal of Resources,Energy and Development

The impacts of climate change are already being felt in developing countries like India, making its people and natural resources extremely vulnerable. In order to tackle such changes, it is important to take adaptive measures. The article does a literature review of the impacts of climate change on India and its forests. It also reviews literature across discipline of sustainable development and social-ecology that argue for the use of resilience framework as a way to tackle climate change for complex systems. Resilience framework is a promising way to manage complex social and ecological systems. Due to the nature and scale of adaptation strategies, institutions like Community Based Natural Resource Management (CBNRM) are being projected to increase adaptation at the local level. Joint Forest Management (JFM) as a type of CBNRM has become an obvious choice for the Government of India to increase adaptation at the local level. This article evaluates the potential of JFM in delivering adaptive strategies at the local level. However, JFM in its current state needs modification and unless modified it will be unable to create resilience. Increasing legal rights and ownership over resources along with creating networks enabling knowledge and resource sharing have been identified as the main strategies to increase the effectiveness of JFM.

In addition to ecosystem services, forests supply essential resources such as timber and non-timber forest products to rural populations who live nearby. These resources contribute vitally to household energy, materials, and various nutritional and medicinal requirements. In many parts of the developing world, women are assigned the task of acquiring these resources. Eco-feminism has used an essentialist position to explain the relation between forests and rural women. This paper, however, argues for the adoption of an institutional ecology approach to clarify patterns of interaction between rural communities and forests. Such an approach focuses on the role played by institutions, civil society, and individuals in environmental exchanges. Using field observations and data from western India, the paper examines the complex arrangement of interactions between rural populations and forest ecosystems, which is mediated by state institutions and long-standing socio-cultural norms and traditions. Data and field observations reveal considerable dependency on forest products in local villages. Patterns of society-forest interaction refl ect local sociocultural and political realities, and reveal the vulnerabilities faced by certain— more dependent and socio-economically marginal—communities, especially the adivasis.

Despite the rapid development of REDD+, in terms of policy and on ground, there is little empirical evidence on how REDD+ interacts with existing governance mechanisms and impacts people’s rights. Implementation of the Forest Rights Act, 2006 (FRA) in India provides an interesting insight into this interaction. Peoples’ rights over forest resources are being recognized under FRA in a comprehensive manner for the first time in independent India. Although a number of challenges of implementation are yet to be addressed, it has started changing the forest landscape of the country by redefining the relationship between the state and the people with regard to the use and management of forest resources. Close to 1.169 million claims for individual and community rights, covering about 3% of the forest area of the country, have been recognized up to 30 April 2011. People are expected to have much more control over the resources if FRA is implemented in its true spirit. While FRA is being implemented, the Government of India wants to leverage its forest conservation record in international climate change negotiations through REDD+. India considers REDD+ to be a bargaining chip in the negotiations. Civil society groups, however, are strongly contesting this instrument, as they fear REDD+ might provide an opportunity to the government to scuttle implementation of FRA. This contestation or politics of REDD+ is being negotiated and renegotiated continuously, where different stakeholders are guarding their own interests. This case provides some early indications of contestations, which REDD+ is going to evoke at the country level.

This paper describes the dynamics of dry forest types in the southern part of India as a function of human interference; while forest fires are seen as the dominant anthropogenic impact. Three case studies from three different states show that locally demanded forest ecosystem services are linked to development stages that are predicted through the local forest management practices. Dry forests are considered one of the most vulnerable ecosystems of the world. In India, these have been transformed to a great extent into Savanna and grassland formations. The absence of human interference or a regulation of the same would allow the systems to turn back into different dry forest formations which would be characterized by a dense canopy and an absence of C₄ grasses in the understory. The current pattern of the utilization of forest services determine the actual open structure of the systems and the services demanded depend on this structure. A change in structure and composition of the vegetation will therefore cause a shift in the services provided. Our understanding of the ecosystem services, derived from dry forest, although fair, lacks knowledge about the changes in quantity and quality of services provided by the dry forest and successional changes of the ecosystem. In this article, such knowledge has been considered essential in the context of the management and conservation of dry forests. Substantial progress in research can only be achieved if long term permanent observations under good monitoring are established.