Centre tweaks Green Credit Programme norms, to focus on restoration of ecosystem

Amid concerns that the Green Credit Programme (GCP), which encourages organisations and individuals to invest in a©orestation project in ‘degraded’ forest lands for ‘green credits’, may encourage tree planting for nancial gains, the Union Environment Ministry — the overall coordinator of the programme — has claried that primacy must be accorded to restoring ecosystems over merely tree planting.

So far, The Hindu has learnt, forest departments of 13 States have o©ered 387 land parcels of degraded

Individuals and companies can apply to ‘restore’ forests, and the actual a orestation will be carried out by State forest departments

forest land — worth nearly 10,983 hectares.

Individuals and companies can apply to the Indian Council of Forestry Research and Education (ICFRE), an autonomous body of the Environment Ministry, to pay to “restore” these forests.

The actual a©orestation will be carried out by State forest departments.

Two years after planting and following an evaluation by the ICFRE, each such planted tree could be worth one ‘green credit’.

These credits can be claimed by the nancing organisation and used in two ways: either using it to comply with existing forest laws that require organisations, which divert forest land for non-forestry purposes, to recompense by providing an equivalent amount of land elsewhere; or be used for reporting under environmental, social, and governance leadership norms or to meet corporate social responsibility (CSR) requirements.

In its latest update on April 12 this year, the Union Environment Ministry had issued guidelines that States must rely on to calculate what it would cost to restore a degraded forest landscape.

The Ministry has changed the earlier requirement that there be a minimum of 1,100 trees per hectare to qualify as reforested landscape and left it to States to specify them.

“Not all degraded forests can support that kind of density. Thus, in some places, shrubs, herbs, and grasses may be suitable for restoring the ecosystem,” Nameeta Prasad, Joint Secretary in the Environment Ministry, told The Hindu.