CARBON SAVING THROUGH FOREST CHILD SCHOOL

CARBON SAVING THROUGH FOREST CHILD SCHOOL

The policies of the world are changing and taking twist to mitigate the adverse effect of climate change. Quantifying carbon offset or carbon trading is becoming one of the leading options to reduce the carbon coming out in the environment and challenging the people to face it. Many organisations have already started taking the advantage of carbon trading and many are under process to get benefit from this emerging market. However, most of the beneficiaries are corporate houses and companies who were earlier big polluters to environment and by decreasing their carbon emission; they are getting advantage of carbon trading i.e. “the polluters are getting the advantage of Carbon trading”.

On the other side, the people living in the forest region (Indigenous people) who are less responsible for polluting the environment and are not responsible for GHG emission are facing opposition from rest of the world directly or indirectly. These people are responsible for the safety of the forest for a long time, but they do not get any prize for it. These people are the right beneficiaries to get the credit of saving environment. Nevertheless, sometimes the situations become worse when instead of getting advantage these people have to fight with the authority and government for the existence of their home and the nearby forests where govt allow companies to establish their plants. Hence, it creates a new type of discrimination between the people living in forest and the polluters, which is raising a new question among the policy makers.

Deforestation and forest degradation is now becoming one of the burning topic and challenges among the world. It is creating the problem for not only food security and human development but also creating the uncertainty about the future of environment and its effects leading to climate change. More the climate change taking place more the situation is becoming adverse to sustain, especially for populace living in the rural area and forests and is not responsible for pollution but directly or indirectly saving the climate. However, the powers of these indigenous people are becoming weaker due to migration and lack of opportunity available locally to survive.

Income generation, basic infrastructure, market access, new technology and awareness about the new technology are the need of the indigenous people living in rural areas or forest areas. It will facilitate them to increase not only the level of lives but also the development of their community, be it social, economical, political and ecological consequences. It can be prioritised only through education.

The education will make them able to understand the value and of trees and how to generate income by living in that reason without migration. The proper schooling will increase the standered of living and the skills to sustain and to be in contact with the world, which will lead to access of market. Schooling will also increase daily wages and will help to stop deforestation in that region. The proper training and schooling will increase the locally based entrepreneur skill of the people which will accelerate tree planting since it is the main source of income in that region.

The 2.2 billion young people worldwide under the age of 18 will be the ones that have to cope with the impacts of climate change. After 20 years, these people will be the main workforce of the world and will work in different region for different purpose. These people have the potential to lead the world from front to save climate. However, these workforce need to be trained with proper tool to cope with the environment and with society. This can be done with the help of millions of community based education initiatives and schools around the world. This will be useful in involving the indigenous forest community in reforestation and climate change education.

School- based nurseries will be the effective way to train the students about the environment and plantation. These students can handle the care for saplings for an initial three to five year period until these are planted in the forest and then these plants can be sold to the REDD+ projects, which will generate the income for school.

The School based nurseries will have following pros-

•             Skill and knowledge development
•             Increase in entrepreneur skills
•             Income generation and no migration
•          Will be the effective channel to teach parents and        community as these children will go to home and will discuss the curriculum
•          Environment awareness among young people, Hence long term benefit

These pros show the project will be sustainable and will have long-term benefit. However, School based nurseries will have to face some challenges too, as described below-

•        Investment in forest may have negative effect on economy, can be misused, and hence increase corruption
•             Project risk- inadequate resources, financial risk
•             Baseline risk- poor performance, less demand in market
•             External risk- policy risk

Sanjay Kumar Sah

(Intern- ARCMDG, AIT Bangkok)