As seen on E&E Climate Wire

By Elizabeth Harball

India may be moving to more strictly enforce the Forest Rights Act of 2006, action one advocacy group says will better protect the forests themselves.

The FRA is a law that would grant local communities in India more power to manage and utilize the forests they live in.

According to a report by India’s Economic Times yesterday, the tribal affairs ministry is reviewing forest rights claims that were previously rejected, action the news website said is backed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The nonprofit Rights and Resources Initiative also reports that Modi has directed the ministry to implement the FRA within two months.

A recent analysis by the RRI estimates that if the law was fully implemented, it would affect approximately 150 million people living on at least 98 million acres of forested land.

However, the analysis also found that villages have been granted titles to just 1.2 percent of the forest area affected by the law.

A separate report released last year by the World Resources Institute and RRI argued that if local communities and indigenous groups are granted the rights to forest land, these groups are more effective at preventing deforestation and forest degradation than government action (ClimateWire, July 24, 2014).

Communities “are much more effective protectors of forests — not only globally but also in India,” said Kundan Kumar, Asia regional director of RRI.

Kumar acknowledged that India’s deforestation rate is low compared with other nations — according to the WRI’s Global Forest Watch, the country’s forest and land-use sector currently serves as a carbon source for the nation, not a carbon sink. But Kumar also argued that communities that depend on forests for their livelihoods are likely to restore the nation’s degraded forests if they are granted greater power over the land.

RRI’s analysis stated that there is limited knowledge of the FRA among local communities, and the group is advocating for a campaign to raise awareness about the law.

“This historical transformation can’t be achieved if there is still little understanding of the Act’s potential and implications in government agencies,” RRI Executive Director Arvind Khare said in a statement.