-The Hindu The Compensatory Afforestation Fund is a deeply flawed and unjust mechanism Last month, Minister of State for Environment, Forests and Climate Change Mahesh Sharma informed Parliament that his Ministry has collected over ?50,000 crore in a Central compensatory afforestation fund (CAF). This money is to be used though the Compensatory Afforestation Fund (CAF) Act, 2016 or CAF, a purported mechanism to offset forest loss. Before issuing forest clearances to a...

-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...

-Scroll.in The existing policy bans commercial activity in natural forests to protect forest dwellers. The new draft policy is up for public comments till April 14. The Union government has drafted a new National Forest Policy. If approved, the policy will allow the corporate sector to grow, harvest and sell trees on government-owned forest lands. So far, this is explicitly banned under the existing National Forest Policy, which was laid down...

-The Indian Express The demand is a call for upholding local practices of belonging On March 12, about 50,000 farmers reached Mumbai, walking 165 km in the hope that their elected representatives would listen when they spoke. A majority of these farmers were Adivasis and one of their demands was the implementation of the Forest Rights Act (FRA) and through it, their land rights. The FRA was enacted in 2006 with the...

-Livemint.com The National Forest Policy will be an overarching policy for forest management, with the aim of bringing a minimum of one-third of India’s total geographical area under forest or tree cover New Delhi: India’s environment ministry has unveiled a draft of the new National Forest Policy (NFP) that proposes to restrict “schemes and projects which interfere with forests that cover steep slopes, catchments of rivers, lakes, and reservoirs, geologically unstable terrain...