Climate Change: Role of Manufacturing Goods and What can CSR do about It?
August 18, 2024
Why is it Important and What can CSR do for it?
Where is the land to plant trees? How can it be maintained? How will we measure the impact? Can we get immediate results?
These are questions asked by donors whenever we present a proposal for planting trees.
Why is this important for us and for the future generations? Understanding this is very important to understand why patience is of utmost important in taking up this very critical initiative.
Water in the river systems has decreased due felling down of trees which were in the catchment areas of these rivers. Trees are extremely important to recharge the soil through its root systems, this results in recharging the aquifers and then the aquifers feed the river system throughout the year. This cycle has been broken by our generation due to indiscriminate cutting down of trees in the catchment areas.
Afforestation is important not only from Carbon reduction point of view, but it is also very important in maintaining water supply for the coming generations.
What are the modalities which can be used to enable this? We discuss one very successful initiative here.
Adoption of tree-based agriculture by farmers:
- Utilizing the unused edges, margins and boundaries of the farms to plant larger trees like teak, timber etc at a spacing at which it will not negatively impact the crop, in fact it has positive impact on fertility of the soil.
- Ideally covering 33% of land by permanent green cover which these larger trees will provide, this has been proven to revive ecology by enhancing biodiversity and rejuvenation of soil through water percolation which happens through rainfall.
- The trees planted on the edge grow over a period accruing like a savings account which can benefit the farmers significantly in his lifetime.
- Often neglected benefit of these trees is reduced use of fertilizer by at least 25% which is good for sustainability. This reduction is due to leaves litter from trees planted at the boundaries which provides organic mulch.
- Reduction in input cost due to reduced use of fertilizers and better soil health.
- The risk of flooding due to rains decreases manifold due to quick absorption of water by roots of these trees.
- Similarly, agroforest also helps in protecting the land during droughts by green cover and retention of water.
What are the critical elements for this initiative to be successful?
- Deployment of field staff: These staff members are trained personnel who work with the farmers and advise and train the farmers on type of trees to plant, the spacing at which they need to be planted and the critical combination of plants which are important to create good agroclimatic conditions.
- Another critical element is creation of nurseries, which can serve as distribution points for the farmers to receive highly subsidized saplings.
I hope that with clarity on various benefits, corporates will take up trees based agriculture in a big way. The effort required to put humanity back on track when it comes to healing the earth as immense and require patience and commitment from corporates to invest in initiatives which matter!
