Participatory active restoration of communal forests in temperate Himalaya, India

Abstract

Potential of community participation and non-timber forest species in forest restoration has been widely discussed but rarely demonstrated through long-term empirical studies. An attempt was made to restore the communal forest in temperate Indian Himalaya by mixed planting of multipurpose broad-leaved trees, bamboo, and medicinal herbs chosen by local people based on pooled indigenous and scientific knowledge. Funding was terminated after 7 years, while people-researcher interactions and monitoring of the restored forest and competing land uses/economic activities continued. People viewed co-occurrence of gregarious flowering induced mortality of bamboo and excessive crop/beehive damage by wildlife in the 10th year as a setback. Further, they envisioned threats to intact forest from mounting timber demand. As a common mitigation measure, they planted in gaps fast-growing and nitrogen-fixing Alnus nepalensis excluded in the initial treatment for harboring pests, yielding inferior products, and its negative association with medicinal herbs/bamboo. After 20 years, transplanted trees/ bamboos were over two times taller than the naturally regenerated ones. The plantation had 75% of belowground and 17% of aboveground carbon stocks and 39% of flowering plant species in intact forest and was economically more efficient than intact forest and farms. People did not expand the trial because of its ineffectiveness in mitigating new problems and satisfying new aspirations. Agricultural abandonment nullified restoration-mediated carbon sequestration. There is a need of translating ecological concepts underlying cost-effective restoration into practices and of policies supporting participatory long-term adaptive forest restoration and its synergy with other economic activities in cultural landscapes.

Participatory forest restoration for sustainable livelihood: A case study from Himalaya

“…This Section summarizes details in previous studies in the same sites (Rao et al, 1999(Rao et al, , 2022 2.1 Study village Khaljhuni (30 0 13'5'' N latitude, 80 0 6' 35'' E longitude) is a typical of remote village around UNESCO World Heritage Nanda Devi Biosphere Reserve in the State of Uttarakhand, India (Fig. 1).…”

“…A generic anticipation was that successful trials would entail voluntary maintenance/upscaling/outscaling and policies favouring them. Extending our previous work in temperate Himalaya (Rao et al, 1999(Rao et al, , 2003(Rao et al, , 2022, the present study provides an account of on-site, off-site and village landscape scale ecological (viz., vegetation structure, owering plant diversity and carbon stocks), economic (viz., yields and income) and social (viz., equity and solidarity) outcomes over a period of 13 years after 7-year-long funding phase in a remote temperate village landscape.…”

“…We launched participatory community forest restoration trials in the early 1990s on a pilot basis (Maikhuri et al, 1995(Maikhuri et al, , 1997Rao et al, 1999Rao et al, , 2003Rao et al, , 2022Bhadauria et al, 2012;Semwal et al, 2013). The generic approach was to promote restoration harmonizing people's interest in livelihood enhancement with the global ones in biodiversity conservation and climate change mitigation.…”

Restoring fire‐degraded social forests via biocultural approaches: a key strategy to safeguard the Amazon legacy

“…Thereby, all steps across the entire initiative must be discussed, agreed, planned, and executed with locals and their representative associations. Such a protagonism/empowering based on reciprocal relationships among stakeholders or participatory active restoration (Rao et al 2022) is critical to guarantee restoration engagement, equity, and effectiveness (Löfqvist et al 2023). It is also in accordance with the required connections between global changes, vulnerable populations and human rights since a safe, clean, healthy, and sustainable environment is a fundamental human right, but gains and losses from global changes are unequally distributed as postulated by the Climate Justice approach (Sultana 2022).…”

The evolution of forest restoration in India: The journey from precolonial to India's 75th year of Independence

“…Gopalakrishna et al (2022) reported that 1.58 million ha of land in India is suitable for restoration, for a potential of 61.3 Tg of carbon sequestration. Forest restoration may also improve the lives of forest‐dependent people (Rao et al, 2021), but recent studies have reported widespread restoration failures (Coleman et al, 2021; Asher & Bhandari, 2021). This review article seeks to understand the historical development of restoration practices in India to better understand why contemporary practices are failing, and what can be done about it.…”