Planning plantations: past learning, toward triple wins in carbon, biodiversity and livelihoods

Governments worldwide are increasingly aiming to increase tree cover, yet the impacts of afforestation programs are poorly understood. Recent evaluations find that they often have unintended negative impacts or tradeoffs between the triple goals of carbon storage, biodiversity protection, and livelihoods. This proposal complements an existing NASA-funded project evaluating the impact of plantations on land cover and livelihoods of poor forest dependent people in the Indian state of Himachal Pradesh. PEER funding will allow CEDAR, an Indian research NGO, to measure carbon storage and biodiversity in the same plantation areas and disseminate results through planned events, working in partnership with a local university. This project will make it possible to evaluate when–and how–afforestation projects achieve the triple win of storing more carbon, protecting biodiversity, and enhancing rural livelihoods, more fully accounting for the potential benefits and costs of plantations in the Himalayas. This project will provide important data on carbon and biodiversity in plantations of multiple age cohorts in diverse ecological types, and develop methodological innovations for analysis of carbon storage, biodiversity, and its relationship to land cover and livelihoods. India provides an ideal environment for exploring the impacts of afforestation programs due to its history of nearly 50 years of plantation programs, the presence of important biodiversity and carbon stocks, and the large number of people at the base of the economic pyramid in India who meet their daily livelihood needs from forests. There is a growing demand in India for accurate estimations of carbon stocks and biodiversity impacts resulting from tree plantations in order to evaluate the effectiveness of afforestation. This proposal will address this demand while also filling a long-standing gap in scientific information about the Himalayas, where social and ecological data are seldom collected together. With the results of the proposal, the researchers involved will contribute to understanding which kinds of afforestation programs have been most effective at achieving triple wins, contribute to policy development in Indian forestry through planned events, and enhance potential for triple wins by developing innovative methods that can be adapted by other countries. https://sites.nationalacademies.org/PGA/PEER/PEERscience/PGA_195533