New Bill for Forest Conservation

India has been at the forefront of fulfilling environmental obligations since the beginning of international deliberations. Be it the presence of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi at the Stockholm Declaration of 1972 or the addition of the term “environment” explicitly in the Constitution, India has never shied away from fulfilling its environmental responsibilities. Thus, it also submitted its nationally determined contributions (NDCs) pursuant to the Paris Agreement in October 2015. Paragraph 2, Article 4 of the Paris Agreement required member states to submit their NDCs. This was done in response to the disappointment faced after the binding targets set up by the Kyoto Protocol were disregarded by the parties. Before the 27th Conference of the Parties, which took place in 2022, India updated its NDCs in line with its long-term objective of making India a net-zero carbon economy by 2070.

One of the eight means to achieve the aforementioned goal is “to create an additional carbon sink of 2.5 to 3 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent through additional forest and tree cover by 2030.” Keeping this in mind, the union cabinet minister for environment, forest and climate change introduced the Forest (Conservation) Amendment Bill, 2023. This is an attempt to amend the Forest (Conservation) Act (FCA), 1980 owing to the changing requirements of the economy.