The Indian government last week released further guidelines for its Green Credit Scheme, revealing plans to award credits for planting trees in landscapes where they don’t grow naturally, a move experts say would be “disastrous” for local ecosystems.

The government first announced the scheme in June last year as an incentive mechanism to reach broader environmental goals beyond what can be achieved through its emerging domestic carbon trading scheme.

It will include crediting project developers for activities such as tree plantations, water conservation, sustainable agriculture, mangrove conservation, and more.

However, on Feb. 22, the Ministry of Environment, Forest, and Climate Change quietly released specifics on some of the activities that would be eligible for credits, drawing ire from observers as the documents were distributed.

According to the guidelines, the government intends to identify “degraded land parcels of area five hectares or above, including open forest and scrubland, wasteland, and catchment areas” as available for green credits through tree plantation.

The notification stated that anyone who desired to plant trees on such lands to create green credits could apply directly to the administrator, the Indian Council of Forestry Research and Education (ICFRE).

Green credits generated can be used by corporates for reporting under environmental, social, and governance indicators, or reported as part of their corporate social responsibility, it added.

“This is going to be disastrous,” Debadityo Sinha, the lead for climate and ecosystems at the Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy, told Carbon Pulse. “The rule is unscientific and completely ignores the ecological aspects of forests.”

“Referring to open forests, scrubland, and catchment areas as ‘degraded’ land parcels is vague and incentivising industrial-scale plantations in such areas will irreversibly alter soil quality, replace local biodiversity, and might be disastrous for local ecosystem services,” Sinha posted on social media platform X.

MISGUIDED

The news comes just a week after a paper published in the journal Science found that “misguided” tree-planting initiatives globally are major drivers of biodiversity loss – primarily in Africa, but also in other biodiversity hotspots such as India and Brazil.

Sinha said that such plantation drives previously undertaken by the states in dry areas have caused loss of local flora and fauna and, in some cases, has also led to droughts and soil erosion.

He added that grasslands, which are part of the forest floor, play the most important role in carbon sequestration by storing one-third of terrestrial carbon stock with more than 90% of it in roots and soil organic carbon.

“Why can’t the ministry identify degraded grasslands and scrub forests, and undertake ecological restoration instead of focussing purely on tree plantations which can actually be alien to the local ecosystem?” said Sinha.

Experts believe that such mass plantation exercises are highly unsustainable and might not benefit the local communities in the long run.

DEATH KNELL

Another expert, Abi Tamim Vanak, director at the Centre for Policy Design at Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE), took to social media to express his disappointment.

The tree plantation programme will be a “death knell” for savannas and other open natural ecosystems impacted, and the government should reconsider its decision, he said.

The government notification stated that the green credits will be calculated at the rate of one credit per tree grown, subject to minimum density of 1,100 trees per hectare, based on local silvi-climatic and soil conditions.

But in a recent article, Vanak said that a standardised recommendation of planting 100-1,000 trees per hectare is “unreasonably high” for sub-humid, semi-arid, and arid regions of the country.

Research has indicated that in semi-arid areas, a moderate tree density of less than 100 per hectare yields optimal benefits for water recharge, he wrote.

“These areas are usually targeted for large-scale tree planting due to their naturally open character, and may face further ecological degradation due to an unnecessarily high density of planting.”

BIG PLANS

At COP28 in Dubai last year, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched a Green Credit Initiative as part of the Green Credit Scheme, to encourage voluntary environmental actions across the country.

New Delhi has repeatedly stressed that the green credit initiative goes beyond the commercial mindset that is often associated with carbon credits, and is pushing tree planting initiatives across the country.

To this end, the NITI Aayog – India’s planning commission – also launched an initiative to restore 26 million hectares of the country’s wastelands by 2030, earlier this month.

Ayyanadar Arunachalam, director at the Central Agroforestry Research Institute under the agriculture ministry, told Carbon Pulse that even though both carbon credits and green credits are attributes of climate change mitigation, green credits are ecologically oriented.

“While one talks about ecology, another talks about economics,” he had said.

“But both of them are aligning with the national priorities and will help us meet our global commitments.”

The South Asian nation plans to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2070 and has committed to the Global Biodiversity Framework goal of protecting 30% of terrestrial and marine areas by 2030.

By Nikita Pandey – nikita@carbon-pulse.com

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