Revitalization of Rivers in India Draft Policy - Isha Guru Jaggi Vasudev

Revitalization of Rivers In India
Draft Policy Recommendation
age-old tenure and occupational rights of land and forest products. Individual
Forest Rights, through recognizing occupancy rights and allowing investments
on the recognized land, can contribute to the food security of marginalized forest
dwellers. Similarly, recognition of traditional and sustainable shifting cultivation
practices support food security. The transfer of forest governance responsibility
from forest department to the communities also creates potential for sustainably
managing forest landscapes for food, nutritional production and livelihoods.
Meeting Sustainable Development Goals: The Forest Rights Act’s potential to enhance
local livelihood and ensure conservation through community forest resource
rights makes it a good legal instrument to address SDGs, especially the goals of
eliminating poverty and achieving ecological sustainability. The Act presents one
of the most important legal instruments available to the government of India to
secure the rights and livelihood of Scheduled Tribes and other traditional forest
dwellers living in the forested landscapes of India having one of the largest
concentration of poor and marginalized in the world, and thereby achieve its
commitments under the SDGs.
Meeting national and international conservation goals: The Convention on Biological
Diversity (CBD) is amongst the most important international treaties on
biodiversity conservation. Recognition of individual and community/community
resource rights and Gram Sabha empowerment, both inside and outside protected
areas, enable the meeting of CBD goals of conservation with full and effective
recognition and respect of rights, protection of traditional knowledge and
knowledge systems and participation in conservation governance.
Climate change mitigation: Following the 2015 COP Paris Agreement on Climate
Change, India has made ambitious plans as part of its Intended Nationally
Determined Contributions (INDC) to sequester an additional 2.5 billion tonnes
of carbon. Effective implementation of CFR rights should be a critical part of
the strategy of carbon sequestration through checking forest degradation and
enhancement of forest stocks. Community forest resource rights can potentially
channelize the creative energies of over 170,000 villages in the country for this
task.
(CFR-LA, 2016)
Annexures
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