Sreelatha Menon: Sirsa’s carbon farmers

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A forest conservator in Haryana gets villagers to grow trees and earn money by selling carbon credits in the international market.

VS Tanwar, the forest conservator of Hisar in Haryana, has been travelling in southern India on election duty. Despite the break from the summer heat, he is missing something back home. He was in the middle of an excitement that had little to do with the elections.

It has to do with what he has been engaged in with farmers in Sirsa for the past two years. He and his colleagues persuaded farmers and villagers in eight villages, six of them in Sirsa and two in adjoining blocks, to devote some of their barren land, about 370 hectares, to a forestry project. It was with great difficulty that they agreed, he said.

The idea was to apply for carbon credits under the clean development mechanism (CDM) of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Tanwar says the project will absorb 12,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide in the next 20 years and give the farmers earnings every five years in the form of carbon credits. A society has been formed of all 200 farmers and the payments will be routed through this set-up.

According to the European Commission, this is the first-ever small forestry project to get a CDM certification. Once the saplings grow, they will begin earning carbon emission reduction (CER) points. The points can be sold to companies in industrialised nations that are under binding commitments to lower carbon emissions to pre-determined targets.

According to Tanwar, at the current rate of $5 per CER, each farmer may earn Rs 1,200 per year after five years. He says the land was useless and anything it earns them is a profit.

The project is part of a larger community forestry project of the Haryana government, which has not applied for a CDM certification. This project, spanning 11 districts, is more than a decade old and tries to link livelihood with forestry and common plantations. Tanwar said the CDM proposal was an afterthought and a separate project was carved out for that.

He said it was worth it and now the Haryana government was looking at it as a pilot so that it could do more such projects in other areas which were infertile or not cultivated.

He says the project is being looked at as an ideal by several states. He says Tamil Nadu, Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh have already made enquiries and have appointed officers to prepare CDM proposals.

According to Tanwar, the fact that it took a decade for a small community forestry proposal to get certified as a CDM was partly because it was new as a CDM option and there was little awareness about it. Forests as carbon sinks are the most obvious way to fight carbon emissions. But whether artificial forests which qualify for CDM are as good as existing forests which are crying for protection is a question that is still awaiting an answer from policy makers and global climate negotiators at Bonn. Hence, there have been demands for compensation for states for avoiding deforestation, a proposal that has not got any positive response so far.

This is competing with the easier option of compensation for afforestation, or Reducing Emissions through Deforestation (RED), which allows a state to first cut down a forest (“for development’’) and then plant a new one in some other place. While this might create a carbon sink, it would not be enough compensation for the wealth of bio-diversity that would be lost with the natural forest.