A group of nearly 100 former government officials and civil servants in India has published an open letter to the government, urging it to withdraw the recently published guidelines for awarding credits to forestry projects under the country’s Green Credit Scheme.
The 91 members of the non-partisan Constitutional Conduct Group (CCG) penned the letter to the Ministry of Environment, Forest, and Climate Change (MoEFCC), saying the policy fails the government’s constitutional duty to protect the environment.
“That such an unscientific order should be issued from the MoEFCC is truly unfortunate, considering that it has in its fold the highly trained, technical Indian Forest Service,” the letter said.
“It is not only contrary to this service’s mandate of protecting forests and wildlife but also negates the unswerving commitment of its officers to preserve and protect the environment.”
India announced the Green Credit Scheme last year, intended to be a framework for companies to earn credits for various beneficial investments, many of them related to the environment.
Companies will be able to use the credits in environmental, social, and governance reporting or to meet their voluntary corporate social responsibility targets.
It remains unclear what the final scheme will look like and exactly what the credits will represent, but the government was met with outcry last month when it published rules related to the forestry part of the scheme.
In particular, observers criticised the ministry for promising to offer credits for tree planting in a wide range of landscape types, including ones where trees don’t have a natural place and are likely to cause harm.
“[The] government is trying to make it easy for entrepreneurs and industrialists to acquire forest land by permitting them to offer, in exchange, money (in the form of green credits), instead of land for land as was the case so far,” the CCG letter stated Tuesday.
“When forest land can be so easily obtained by private entrepreneurs, it does not take much imagination to realise that the extent of land legally classified as forests at present will steadily shrink until there is virtually nothing left.”
CORPORATE BENEFIT
The former officials said that all forest lands, whether grasslands, wetlands, deserts, scrub forests, or open forests, are ecological entities in themselves and harbour a wide variety of plant and animal species endemic to the Indian subcontinent, and that establishing plantations in these areas will mean an end to the survival of these species.
“Compensatory afforestation plantations already undertaken in our country are known to have dubious success rates,” the group said.
A recent study published in the journal Science said misguided tree-planting initiatives globally are major drivers of biodiversity loss, majorly in Africa, but also in India and Brazil.
CCG added that the many communities who dwell in these forests also depends on such lands for their livelihood, which will be directly and adversely impacted by this scheme.
Instead of the Green Credit Scheme, the ecological value of such lands can be protected and restored by the forest department itself, with the funds already at its disposal, the group added.
“This would result in more carbon sequestration, survival of varied ecosystems and endangered species, and would also serve the needs of people. This would not, however, benefit the private sector at the cost of the community and the country at large,” said the letter.
CCG, which also includes several former environment ministry officials, said green credits as a concept is “anachronistic”.
“This is a transaction weighted heavily in favour of Big Capital. If the government is really serious about conservation with financial help from the private sector, it should permit relevant, impactful conservation projects as eligible activities under the law governing Corporate Social Responsibility,” it said.
Meanwhile, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has repeatedly declared that the green credit initiative does not have the “commercial mindset” which is often associated with the carbon credits.
“Carbon credit emphasises what should not be done, it has a negative perspective. Green credit shows us the way forward,” Modi said when addressing the G20 summit last year.
Even so, India is in the process of developing a mandatory as well as a voluntary market for carbon trading, with a compliance scheme expected to launch in 2026.
By Nikita Pandey – nikita@carbon-pulse.com
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