Mitigating Climate Change through a Judicious Consideration of Forest Land Diversion Cases

At present, there are no specific criteria to decide whether a forest land is to be diverted or not for non-forestry purposes. The Forest Conservation Act, 1980 has brought in a regulatory regime wherein, the State governments have to take permission from the Government of India for the diversion of forest land. After the decision to divert a forest land is taken, the user agency is supposed to pay for the compensatory afforestation as well as net present value (NPV) of the forest land. For national parks and sanctuaries, the NPV to be paid is 10 times and 5 times, respectively. Although the coming of the Forest Conservation Act, 1980 has brought down to a large extent, the pace of diversion of forest land there is still a continuous demand to divert forest land for various projects. It is essential that the diversion of forest land is linked with sustainability and the issues of ecological footprint and carbon budgeting. This will mould the whole exercise of a NPV centred forest land diversion to a sustainability linked natural resource management. The paper proposes a check-list based decision-making tool to examine the proposals of forest land diversion.