Union Minister of Environment, Forest and Climate Change Dr Harsh Vardhan inaugurated the two-day Conference on “Sustainable Landscapes & Forest Ecosystems: Theory to Practice”
He emphasized the need to create an enabling environment through small steps.
He emphasized the need to create an enabling environment through small steps.
- The objectives of the conference include – exploring issues and opportunities for ecosystem approach to land management in India; discussing how the approaches and tools developed under the Forest-PLUS programme can be used to improve forest management in India and to document and disseminate that learning with a wider group.
- Dr Harsh Vardhan urged on planting more trees, to bring more areas under forest and tree cover.
- He highlights the need of new and out of the box ideas and solutions on increasing the forest cover much beyond the stipulated 33 per cent.
- Government’s commitment to increase the country’s forest cover from 24% to 33% of the geographical area and creating an additional carbon sink of 2.5 to 3 billion tons of CO2 equivalent in forests was reiterated by him
- He also launched“Wood is Good” campaign on the occasion.
- The Partnership for Land Use Science (Forest-Plus) is a joint programme by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEF&CC)
- It will strengthen capacity for REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) implementation in India.
