Safeguards for the UNFCCC’s REDD+ mechanism arose in response to concerns voiced by forestdependent communities over its potential to infringe upon their rights and territories. Since then, several institutions have also developed voluntary standards for carbon markets, in addition to safeguards guidelines adopted by multilateral funding institutions. Across these standards and guidelines, safeguards are conceptualized and articulated in different ways: as bulwarks against the impacts of interventions (“do no harm”); as means to achieve sustainable development outcomes (“do good”); or as mechanisms to catalyse the transformation of forest-dependent communities (“do better”). It is urgent to clarify and understand the role of safeguards as the climate crises prompts interest on the part of countries and corporations in ‘nature-based solutions’ to meet their emissions reduction targets and commitments to biodiversity. This influx of investments in tropical forests can bolster sustainable development objectives, but also poses risks to communities, including the creation of perverse incentives and the deepening of existing social and economic inequities.
This paper will present the results of comparative reviews of how different standards for voluntary carbon markets deal with social safeguards and issues related to the rights of IPs and LCs. We found that while safeguards have become a mainstay of REDD+ discourse and practice, there is considerable variation in their underlying objectives, the ways in which they are formulated, and the extent and effectiveness of their implementation. Thinking through safeguards, we will present a typology to understand their potential for change, how nature-based solutions may re-engage with the men and women of IPs and LCs and their rights and justice concerns, and synthesised factors to enable initiative to support and protect those rights.
Deeply entangled in the commons, indigenous lives in Bangladesh, a country known to be at the frontlines of the climate crisis, bear the brunt of development. In 2004, the Government of Bangladesh undertook a project to build an eco-park in the forests of Madhupur by displacing the indigenous Garo people. A movement grew to stop the project and in one protest Piren Snal, an indigenous activist, was shot dead by the police. Although the project was suspended, the indigenous activists carry legal charges brought against them to this day.
In 2011, the “Save Sundarbans Movement” was born and carried on for a decade, also to save a forest. The Sundarbans is a large mangrove forest with complex ecological networks of tidal waterways and small islands. The movement mobilized against the construction of a 1320-megawatt capacity coal-fired power plant within the forest’s ecologically sensitive area. A collaboration between Bangladesh and India, the plant began operation in 2022. Besides resisting the development fetish of the government, the movement extended the commons discourse in a multispecies framework.
In this paper, I read of a song and a digital artwork representative of those two movements to examine how commons are conceptualized in resistance art. The song composed by a band of indigenous Garo musicians named Madol commemorates the Madhupur Movement and the environmental martyr Piren Snal. The artwork by Mita Mehedi representing the “Save Sundarbans Movement” posits simultaneously a scathing critique of development narratives and a call for multispecies justice. Here, I investigate how politics for reclaiming the environmental commons intersects with the struggle for democracy for the postcolonial nation-state of Bangladesh. I further examine how reclaiming the commons in the Anthropocene informs the struggle for justice and what political imaginations of a habitable and collective future are discernable in thinking about the commons.
“Nature is our strongest ally in the fight against climate change.” (European Commission, 2021). Based on this principle, Nature-Based solutions (NBS) have become one of the trending solutions to solving climate change concerns since the late 2000s. In India, the right to the environment is embedded in its Constitution and is supported by several legislations, policies, and schemes. However, since the launch of the National Smart Cities Mission in 2015, smart cities have been perceived as a solution to urban sustainability concerns. The resultant large-scale ICT infrastructure development (and associated re-development, retrofitting, and greenfield activities) via Area-Based Development programs calls for the need to assess these and the associated NBS projects for spatial justice.
This work thus, focuses on Amritsar smart city – a heritage smart city of historical, cultural, and ecological significance – as a case study to assess the status of spatial justice of NBS within the city, and its connection with the policies driving these developmental projects. The research focuses on three key questions: (a) What kind of nature-based solutions are embedded in the City Development Plan, Smart city proposal, and other schemes of city governance in Amritsar? (b) What challenges do these NBS aim to solve and how do they align with the IUCN categorisation of NBS approaches? (c) How are these projects distributed across the city and whether the distribution is equitable across various socio-economic classes?
Using spatial justice as the theoretical framework and a geospatial methodological approach, this study aims to highlight the significance of inclusive urban planning in achieving just outcomes for all. Therefore, this work will contribute towards sustainable urban practices by providing actionable insights to urban practitioners and policymakers.
The Mangar Bani sacred grove specifically, and the Aravalli hill forest commons of the Delhi National Capital Region (NCR), India, provide a variety of ecosystem service benefits in this densely populated region. Recent pre-historic rock art and stone tool findings increase their significance. They also face threats from a variety of fronts – of tenure, of zoning, of landtype classification, and forest classification. The Aravalli land tenure has shifted in several different directions - from village commonland to contested privatized commonland, municipally appropriated commonland, or forest department government land. The zoning in the Delhi NCR towns at multiple scales – region, state, and city also drives the permissible landuses in the Aravallis. Changes in the landtype classification of the Aravallis in the revenue records dilute the applicability of protective regulation. Finally the legal recognition of the Aravallis as forests – hangs on whether they are formally notified as forest, or just recorded as forests in government records, or merely meet a ‘dictionary meaning of forest’ criteria, all of which have been contested over time. These threats are intensified closer to the capital city of Delhi, due to the heightened interest from the real estate and mining sectors. This practitioner perspective will explore how each of these factors are interpreted and play out over time and the role of different actors – the revenue, forest, environment, archaeology, mining and urban planning departments, the real estate and mining firms and the judiciary and local rural and urban communities. The paper will explore how these factors and actors influence the conservation and regeneration of the Aravalli hill forest commons of the Delhi National Capital Region (NCR) while focusing on the case of the rural Mangar Bani sacred grove, the urban Aravalli Biodiversity Park and a few other cases.
© 2025 | Privacy & Cookies Policy
