Green Credit Scheme

Syllabus subtopic: Conservation, environmental pollution and degradation, environmental impact assessment

Prelims and Mains focus: About Green Credit Scheme and its significance, About FAC

News: The Forest Advisory Committee (FAC), an apex body tasked with adjudicating requests by the industry to raze forest land for commercial ends, has approved a scheme that could allow “forests” to be traded as a commodity.

If implemented, it allows the Forest Department to outsource one of its responsibilities of reforesting to nongovernment agencies.

About the scheme

The proposed ‘Green Credit Scheme’ allows agencies — they could be private companies, village forest communities — to identify land and begin growing plantations. After three years, they would be eligible to be considered as compensatory forest land if they met the Department’s criteria.

The FAC discussed the ‘Green Credit Scheme’ in a December 19, 2019 meeting. It was first developed by the Gujarat state government and was pending for approval from the MoEF&CC since 2013.

What is the current scenario?

In the current system, industry needs to make good the loss of forest by finding appropriate non forest land — equal to that which would be razed under the provisions of the Forest (Conservation) Act, 1980.

It also must pay the State Forest Department the current economic equivalent — called Net Present Value — of the forest land.

It’s then the department’s responsibility to grow appropriate vegetation that, over time, would grow into forests.

Why this action has been taken?

Industries have often complained that they find it hard to acquire appropriate nonforest land, which has to be contiguous to existing forest.

Nearly Rs.50,000 crore had been collected by the Centre over decades, but the funds were lying unspent because States were not spending the money on re-growing forests.

The Supreme Court intervened, a new law came about with rules for how this fund was to be administered.

About Rs. 47,000 crore had been disbursed to States until August, but it has barely led to any rejuvenation of forests.

About Forest Advisory Committee

The FAC is a body under the Union Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEF&CC) and is responsible for regulating forest diversion.

Source: The Hindu

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