Ruth DeFries, co-founding dean of the Columbia Climate School, works in the Central Indian forest landscape. Excerpts from an interview on balancing infrastructure building with conservation
The Central Indian Plateau is globally important for tiger conservation and is also a hotspot for climate impacts on vulnerable people. Ruth DeFries, Professor of Ecology and Sustainable Development at Columbia University and co-founding Dean of the Columbia Climate School, works on how to build realistic pathways for people and nature to thrive here in the Central Indian Forests.
How does infrastructure development in the Central Indian landscape, particularly linear infrastructure such as highways and railway lines that cut through old forests and fracture habitats, impact people, biodiversity, wildlife, and local livelihoods?
How do you accommodate the need for linear infrastructure while maintaining the opportunity for wildlife to move across the landscape? Local people rely on the forest, so the health of the forest is critically important for non-timber forest produce, for energy needs, for fuel wood, for construction. When there is fragmentation of the landscape, the health of the forest is affected, so the opportunity to have resources from the forest is diminished. But I will also say that I’ve seen, when I started working in the Central Indian landscape, roads were kutcha roads. Over time, there have been schemes to pave the roads, and that does help people to be able to move during the monsoon, to have goods transported at a lower cost… So it goes both ways.
There are some successful examples, such as NH44, which has the largest underpass for wildlife in the world. It is between the Kanha-Pench corridor on the Pench side, and wildlife are using that underpass. It’s a kilometre-long underpass.
So there are ways to recognize that the development of linear infrastructure is very important, very important from an economic point of view, and there are ways to have mitigation structures that can enable wildlife to continue to thrive.
India’s climate plans require carbon sinks to be generated by increasing forest cover to 33% of our total land area. This will necessitate a forestation of currently cultivated land. How will this impact communities living off these lands?
The conversation around using forests and trees as carbon sinks is very complicated in a place like India, because people rely on the forest. There are large populations that live around forests. So forests are not only carbon—they are biodiversity, habitat, water, protecting watersheds.
When you think about only the carbon, that would lead you to a solution like planting fast-growing species like eucalyptus to sequester carbon. That’s not a good solution for biodiversity. What’s good for biodiversity are native species, multiple species.
This is the conversation now—how to build these other important attributes of forests into the thinking about markets and finance.
Another big conversation that is happening around India is where do you put those forests? So there are places like in Rajasthan, Gujarat, and the more arid parts of the country, which are natural grassland ecosystems that people rely on for fodder, pastoralists rely on. Putting trees in those places, especially non-native trees, requires a lot of water, so it’s less likely for them to survive.
The other aspect is a sort of ethical one, in that if we think about using tree planting to offset emissions from high-emitting sectors, is that really the way we want to have a climate solution?
There’s also the positive aspect of bringing finance to forests, which would probably not come in any other way. So it’s a very complicated conversation.
I’ve been working with one of my postdocs at Columbia on this very issue, where we have looked at these tree-planting carbon market projects, and gone on the ground to see the outcome. There are a few where you can very much see the benefit to the local people; they are receiving income, being able to sell fruits, and actually benefiting. But those are projects that didn’t start out as carbon projects but as livelihood projects, with deep connections with the local community. Where we get into trouble is when a project developer comes in and tries to make a quick buck on a carbon market project, and the power imbalances are so stark in these landscapes that the project developer can take advantage of the local community, who are the stewards of the forest.
Can you tell us a little about how climate change is affecting traditional livelihoods and migration among indigenous people in the Central Indian landscape?
We’ve done, through studies at Columbia, a lot of work on this issue of migration in Central India. My thinking is that development is achieved when people have opportunities. Like I can choose to live in my house next to Kanha Tiger Reserve, or I can choose to live in New York City, that’s what development is, when people have that opportunity to make a choice.
That’s not the situation now. From my experience in Central India—I’m very careful not to extrapolate too far–there’s quite a lot of distress migration. Seasonally, people go pretty far for jobs in construction, as security guards, low-skilled jobs, between Diwali and Holi, because they really don’t have a choice.
In Central India, the very poorest will send someone to the cities regardless of whether it’s a dry year, wet year, good year, bad year. That’s their livelihood strategy.
At the higher end, and I wouldn’t say this is very high, but the relatively better off, who have more land and are more engaged in agriculture, they are climate sensitive. There’s different effects on different parts of the population. But you also can’t say it has no effect, because it clearly is very hard for people when there is a dry year.
Imagine there is a genie who will grant you three wishes for the Central Indian forest landscape. What would you ask for?
Dream big, right? One wish to the genie would be for a thriving local economy for local people to engage in small businesses, in activities, where they would have the option to stay in the landscape if that’s what they aspire for their lives. A local economy that would depend on the resources of nature, but not be extractive of nature. The second is that we’d have healthy populations of wildlife, who could continue to move across the landscape to keep their populations healthy, which would coexist with the local population, and we’d have nature and people coexisting together. My third wish is that I’ve gotten so much insight and so much joy out of getting to know this landscape, the people, the wildlife, the agrodiversity—I wish everyone could have that experience.
