Yale Prof brings innovative forest planning tools

Alark
Alark Saxena

NEW DELHI: Alark Saxena, who is on a visit to India, is the Program Director of Yale Himalaya Initiative and a Lecturer at the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, Yale. His mission is to present the innovative forest planning and modeling tools developed at Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies to the Madhya Pradesh forest department to help evaluate the long term impacts of current policy decisions.

Alark is a social-ecologist who is interested in questions associated to sustainability, climate change resilience, livelihood and bio-energy. His current research is focused in India and Nepal. In India, Alark is developing tools to evaluate livelihood resilience of forest based communities. Within Himalayas, Alark is evaluating the impacts of tourism on local livelihood and culture in the Sagarmatha National park, Nepal. Alark is also working on a new project on evaluating the resilience of village communities to trans-boundary floods on the border between India and Nepal. Alark hails from Bhopal and is a former graduate of the Indian Institute of Forest Management.
Alark obliged India Post with his views on a number of issues in a recent e-mail interview. Here are excerpts:

Who invited you to come to India and give talks?
I have been invited by Forest PLUS which is a collaborative project between USAID and Ministry of Environment and Forest. I will be presenting some of our innovative policy decision making tools that can help forest managers understand the implications of various government policies and market influences on the health of forests and the livelihoods of forest dependent communities.

In which institutes will you be giving the talks?
I will be giving talks on a couple of different topics in different institutions. At Forest PLUS and MP Forest Department, the talk is focused on showcasing the strengths of the newly conceptualized tool on integrated landscape and livelihood management system.

The idea is to provide/gain perspective on how the new tool can support forest departments in managing the forest resources for ecosystem services and provide local livelihoods required for implementing international REDD+ (Reduced emissions from degradation and deforestation) projects.

I will be talking about development of a methodology that will help in evaluating resilience of local communities to climate change in India at the Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW) in Delhi.

I will be giving a talk on a new methodology for modeling livelihoods of natural resource based communities at the Indian Institute of Technology in Mumbai. Through this method we can temporally project a long term dynamics of local livelihoods and showcase how modern computing techniques can allow us to measure complex phenomenon (such as livelihoods) and help policy makers in taking better decisions.

What is the mission of your visit to India?
My mission is to present the innovative forest planning and modeling tools that we have developed at Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies that will be used by MP forest department to evaluate the long term impacts of current policy decisions on both the forests and the local livelihoods. These new tools will be used for planning and management by the forest department for effective decision making associated to REDD+ projects. The REDD+ projects can provide significant revenue for sequestering carbon in Indian forests through the Clean Development Mechanisms.

What do you specialize in vis-à-vis India?

I specialize in a couple of different areas. My primary specialization is in issues associated to climate change Impacts and adaptation.

I am interested in developing ways to analyze the ability of natural resource dependent communities to adapt to climatic and other changes. More than 60% of Indian population is still directly/ indirectly dependent on forests for their sustenance. I evaluate the impact of climate change on such communities.
I also specialize in the issues of biofuels. I have worked on projects to evaluate the feasibility of vegetable oil as biodiesel and currently working on extracting Algae as source of biodiesel in India. India imports roughly 75% of its petroleum needs spending precious foreign exchange reserves. The ability to produce fossil fuel can significantly increase self-reliance. My interest is to find feasible bio-stocks of Algae that can be used to create biodiesel thus help in reducing carbon emission, increase energy independence and create livelihood solution.

Another field of work is on Disaster Risk Reduction and resilience. We are interested in developing resilience of poor communities in Himalayan areas. We are developing a novel methodology to assess the vulnerability of local households to floods that can be used by local NGO’s that are otherwise unable to work on the important topics of resilience.

How is global climate change impacting rural environment?
Global climate change affects poor and rural communities disproportionately. Communities that sustain themselves on livelihoods associated to natural resources such as agriculture, non-timber forest produce collection, grazing, fisheries etc are highly susceptible to shifts in weather patterns caused by climate change. Farmers are increasingly complaining about their inability to predict the monsoon.

This has reduced their ability to sow seeds at the right time. The Global climate models prediction for India suggest that the wetter places in the country will become wetter and the dryer places will become further dry. This will significantly shift the ecology of the regions in India forcing poor and rural natural resource based communities to shift or migrate to other places. Hence the rural and the poor communities are significantly affected by climate change impacts.

One of our recently concluded 5-year long study in Central India suggests that the forest dependent rural communities are very susceptible to shifts in weather patterns and changes in government policies. The communities can lose up to 70% of their hard earned income if the impacts of climate change coincide with unfavorable shifts in government policies (such as converting the status of adjoining forest to a National Park).

What do you recommend as a solution?
Rural and natural resource dependent communities should be supported to shift from more natural resource dependent activities to other non-weather affected livelihood activities. This will reduce the vulnerability to the unpredictable weather patterns. Creating a diversity of livelihood options will help in reducing the risks associated to climate change. To increase resilience, it will be important for local governments to continue improving their water and land resources by conducting soil and moisture conservation works.

Activities like afforestation and reforestation of diverse and locally appropriate tree species will also help in increasing resilience of the region. Finally, the rural to urban migration might also have a potential solution for reducing the impacts of climate change. However, one has to be careful in introducing such solutions as it might lead to some other social challenges.

Have you given any report or recommendations to the government of India?
At present, due to the nature of my trip, I have not shared my findings with the government of India. However, I am looking at opportunities to discuss some of these with the government of Madhya Pradesh where I have done bulk of my research. I also look forward to engaging with other state governments in subsequent visits.

However, through this interview, I can certainly suggest that shifts in government policies associated to national forests need to be thought very carefully. As mentioned in the earlier question, rural communities are still very dependent on forest resources. Their susceptibility to climate change along with shifts in forest policies can make these local communities extremely vulnerable. Coinciding impacts of such polices can lead to mass migration towards urban areas creating further social, infrastructure and environmental problems.

Krishan Sharma
India Post News Service