Have you ever heard of ‘zero villages’? Labelled as such in the census, these are villages tucked deep inside forest areas and are often deprived of basic rights, amenities and welfare schemes. And unlike your regular revenue villages, they even are deprived of gram panchayats and sabhas to register their demands. This, 75 years after independence.

Our state researcher Aishwarya Mohanty travels to forests of Odisha to find how despite being notified as revenue villages, these forest villages fight for recognition and an end to bureaucratic red tapism. Read the story here.

Who funds the climate fight!

For years, rich countries [read historical polluters] have put undue pressure on poorer, developing countries to commit to ambitious climate goals ignoring their lack of resources or means to do so. This comes even as rich countries’ try to wriggle out — just as the United Kingdom plans to — of their promises to fund the climate fight.

It was only last month that two climate events held in Europe (in Bonn and Paris) brought this tussle to the fore. Both saw developing countries make strong statements on this failure. While one was the annual meeting of parties at Bonn, Germany, France hosted a summit where countries discussed changes in the current finance framework.
 
The Bonn meeting, a precursor to the 28th Conference of Parties in Dubai or COP28, saw a fierce fight between developed and developing countries, on one topic that rich countries have been pushing for, mitigation — which deals with reducing carbon emissions and increasing forest cover. Pushed by the European Union, a discussion on this could potentially mean forcing developing countries to adopt expensive methods to reduce carbon emissions.

Displeased, developing country parties refused to include mitigation without mentioning finance, money which is required to implement it. A day before the talks ended, countries decided to drop both mitigation as well as finance from the agenda.
 
The meeting at Paris was the first of its kind. Last year, Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley made headlines when she introduced the Bridgetown initiative to help more money flow to combat climate change. At what Mia called the “how dare you” summit, countries met to take this conversation forward. Unlike Bonn, the Paris summit was seen as an attempt to rebuild trust between the global north and south. Even though it did not lead to any major decisions, the summit marks rethinking of the existing financial mechanism, which is unfairly tilted towards rich countries.

Talk about green credits
By Anmol

As part of India’s commitment to reducing carbon emissions under the Paris Agreement, the government has introduced a mechanism for tradeable ‘green credits’.

The term green credit refers to a singular unit of an incentive provided for an activity with a positive impact on the environment. Such activities include tree plantation, water conservation, waste management and construction of sustainable buildings.

On June 27, the Union government released the draft Green Credit Programme Implementation Rules, 2023, for public comment. The rules aim to “leverage a competitive market-based approach for Green Credits”.

According to the draft, activities which generate green credits under this programme may also get carbon credits from the same activity under the carbon market. The administrator of the programme, the Indian Council of Forestry Research and Education, shall develop guidelines for the implementation of the programme.

The draft notification is available for public objections and suggestions for 60 days.

New in our database

We currently have 707 ongoing conflicts documented in the LCW database. Last month, our team of researchers added 10 new conflicts. We list a few:

• We documented six cases in Assam last month. In the state’s Sonitpur and Darrang districts, the forest department is evicting at least 3,000 people from their homes. The communities are being evicted to make way for a wildlife corridor, reports East Street Journal Asia. The state recorded four other cases of evictions in Darrang, Nagaon, Tinsukia and Morigaon.