7short films on the Commons - a must watch

What are the Commons and who owns them?

What are the important elements pertaining to the Commons that we ought to recognise and value?

What are our responsibilities towards our Commons?

Watch this series of 7short films - and pause...to think.

Film courtesy of the Foundation for Ecological Security (FES). Used with permission.

Conflict of multiple objectives and the need to make trade-offs critical challenges in the management of Commons, says Jairam Ramesh

In the first post of the series, we saw what Shri Jairam Ramesh, India's Minister of Environment and Forests, had to say on the global commons (climate change) in his keynote address at the inaugural session of the 13th biennial IASC International Conference in Hyderabad. 

In this post we will look at what he had to say about the regional (rivers and aquifers) and local commons (management of forests).

Addressing the issue of regional commons, the Minister said:

Central to the management of regional commons, is the existence of multiplicity of objectives and the extent to which you are going to have tradeoffs amongst these objectives. Take a river basin for example. 20 years ago, the concept of a minimum environmental flow did not exist in our policy discourse. So, we planned a series of Hydel power projects, we planned a series of irrigation projects, we had a series of drinking water projects, and today we are finding that many of our important and ecologically sensitive river systems we do not have what now ecologists are coming to call as the minimum environmental flow. 

How do we deal with issues of minimum environmental flow when we have multiple pressures on the commons , when we have multiple pressures on the river systems. We have pressure from the need for developing Hydel projects, we have pressure for drinking water to reach a larger population, but at the same time, unless we are able to assure a minimum environmental flow in these rivers, the very ecological basis of having these regional commons gets lost. And this is an issue which is becoming increasingly important in the policy discourse. 

Shri Ramesh also took the opportunity to point out some of the challenging decisions that he has had to take recently in this regard. He said,

I have had to face severe opposition, on my decision to put a stop on Hydel projects in the upper reaches of the Ganga in the state of Uttarakhand. Even after much of the work had gone on, on some of these Hydel Projects. There was a Hydel project on which we had spent a 1000 Cr of Rs. and 40% of the work had already been done and I had to wage a battle for a year to get that project scrapped because had we continued with that project we would have interfered with the minimum environmental flow of the river Bhagirathi which has not just religious and cultural significance to most Indians but also ecological significance. These are the types of conflicts and tradeoffs that we have to make increasingly in the regional commons of which water is going to be the most important.

 On the issue of forest management (which he described as local commons), Shri Ramesh stated:

We have over 70 million hectares of Forest cover in our country, roughly 21 % of the geographical area and for the last 30-40 years, the theology of Forest planning has been that 1/3rd of India should come under forests. But I have asked for the last 19 months, what is the source of this theology? Where did this theology originate that 1/3rd of India should come under Forest cover. Till today, I have not got a satisfactory answer to this most basic of questions.

That’s why I think the time has come for us to make a radical shift in our approach from the preoccupation with the quantity of forests to a greater attention to the quality of forests.

Explaining why he felt that this shift was essential, the Minister said that given the various pressures on the land today, sticking to the ideology of trying to get 1/3rd of India under forest cover would not be very practical. According to him,

With 70 Million hectares of Forest cover, and 40% of it, open, degraded forests, the challenge before us is to  improve just the quality of forests, rather than chasing the mirage of bringing 1/3rd of India under Forests. We know, because of the demographic and the development pressure, that it is not going to be possible.

...the carbon sequestration potential of Indian forests was estimated to be roughly 10% for the mid 90s, but it has gone down because as the economic growth increases, as we sustain 8-9% growth, we will not be able to compensate for the loss of forest cover. Our estimate is that by 2020 the annual carbon sequestration potential of our Indian Forests would be somewhere between 6-7% of our annual greenhouse gas emissions. If we are able to even maintain the 6-7% range, that would be a major contribution.

Acknowledging that forests not only play an ecological role but a very critical social and economic role as well, Shri Ramesh admitted that often policy makers overlooked the latter functions of the forest and stated there was a need for a change in mindset in this respect. He stated

We know that not just ecologically, in terms of social and economic values, our forests play a very important role The people who have worked with Indian Forests know, that over 200 - 250 million Indians depend on forests for their livelihoods a fact which is very often forgotten by forest department. I hasten to add that I very much include myself and I think the challenge before us, in managing this huge local commons called the Indian Forests, is to recognise not just their ecological value to be brought into public discussion, but also the age-old economic and social functions our forests perform, which unfortunately over the years, our laws have not been able to recognise and enshrine; our challenge in managing the local commons lies in changing the mindset that we have had in managing the forests and recognising not just the quantity of forests, but the quality of forests, and also in recognising that forests have not just an ecological function but more importantly and fundamentally a very important social and economic function.

Climate Change Dialogue: Need a Variety of Approaches & Diverse, Context-based Solutions to Address Equity Issues, says Jairam Ramesh

In his keynote address at the recently concuded 13th biennial IASC International Conference in Hyderabad, Shri Jairam Ramesh, India's Minister of Environment and Forests, addressed a wide range of commons related issues - from the global (climate change) to regional (use of waters, management of rivers and aquifers) and the local (management of forests).

In the first post of the series, we look at what the Minister had to say on the global commons.

Talking about climate change, Shri Ramesh said that the lack of communication between negotiators and academics was something he found very frustrating. According to him,

All the interesting work on climate change is taking place in the academic world and the negotiators in their world of round brackets, square brackets, footnotes and distinctions, such fine distinctions of shall and will and could and should are completely oblivious to the work of Jeffrey Frankel at Harvard, Micheal Spence of Stanford, Shelling or Prof.Ostrom herself. I think this has been a great tragedy and one of things I have been involved in is to try and get the negotiating community to look at this whole academic literature that now exists in the climate change area because central to a successful negotiation is how do we address the issue of equity.

Touching upon the Cancun agreement, Shri Ramesh spoke about the need for an alternate way to define equitable access. He said that the traditional framework of equitable access to carbon space tended to conjure up a right to pollute but the issue was actually one of ensuring a decent quality of life and standard of living to the country's population. Hence the new emerging concept at Cancun was that of equitable access to sustainable development. However, instead of seeking that one  holy grail of a formula or framework that would ensure equitable access to sustainable development, (which  he felt would inevitably create a stalemate as it would be near impossible for 193 countries to agree), Shri Ramesh stated that the way forward was perhaps in devising a set of formulae, a  diverse variety of approaches and context-based solutions.

Talking about the need for an operational definition of sustainable development, and the need to focus not only on equality of access on an international scale but on domestic issues as well, Shri Ramesh stated:

First of all we have to define what sustainable development is and we owe the definition of sustainable development to Mr.Nitin Desai, who defined in the 5th planning commission 22 years ago as the ability of a generation to meet its consumption needs without endangering the ability of a future generation. That was the kind of definition for sustainable development, but now we have to give it operational meaning and work out a framework that ensures equitable access which looks at population, per capita income, and which also looks at internal issues of distribution because in a country like India which is rightly concerned about the equality of access on the international scale cannot be oblivious to differences of access internally. This is now a big issue that we as a country have to come to grip with. We are world leaders when it comes to talking about international inequality but somehow we feel shy of dealing with domestic inequality. The domestic inequality in access to sustainable development today is a very serious issue that policy makers and academics have to come to terms with.

He summed up his thoughts on the global commons as follows:

So, on the global commons issue, all I would say now, what Cancun did was to (revive) the multilateral process which had reached a dead-end in Copenhagen, and brought about a certain degree of consensus on some of the issues that were (eluding) the negotiators and one of the biggest issues is how do you define a global goal and how do you define equity in the achievement of this goal, but, without necessarily endangering the growth prospects of developing countries.