-Newsclick.in The state government is said to be formalising plans to give 40% of "Degraded Forest Land" to private firms, allege activists. New Delhi: Amidst the ongoing battle by tribal communities in India to formalise their land claims, the Madhya Pradesh government has reportedly proposed the privatisation of 40% of “Degraded Forest Land” to private firms. The government claims that this land is wasteland and has degraded for multiple reasons, and that private...

-The Hindu Among this year’s Padma Shri awardees are a father and daughter who turned a barren wasteland into a riot of trees and crops Furrowed with deep gullies, its topsoil all but gone, this degraded patch of land near Odagaon in Odisha’s Nayagarh district was once a dense forest. Whenever nature tried to reclaim it, the little shoots would be nibbled away by goats and sheep. The villagers who owned the...

-The Indian Express IPCC report shows how land use affects climate change. It must not be used to target developing countries on global warming A report released on Thursday by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has concluded that better management of the world’s farms and forests is necessary to tackle climate change. Land use has always been part of conversations on climate change and activities like afforestation have held...

-Down to Earth Over 60 years after the country got its first plan to rejuvenate the rivers, not a single basin has been spared from overexploitation All the 20 river basins of the country share the story of the Cauvery: how human interference has changed every river’s form and flow pattern over the past few decades. Water in the country’s three major rivers — the Indus, the Brahmaputra and the Ganga — has...

-TheWire.in Unless consumer preferences shift to climate resistant crops, goals associated with the policy won’t materialize. On March 14, the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC) uploaded a draft of the National Forest Policy 2018, three decades years after the last such policy. The draft appears to be an attempt to shift the approach towards forestry in India – specifically, from a local community- and ecology-centric approach emphasised in the...