Climate Change

with specific reference to Mountains and Adaptation Interventions for Mountain...

Climate change is generally recognized as one of the greatest challenges of this century and is projected to have potentially severe impacts on developing countries. Climate change and global warming are the main causes of concern for both policy makers (World Governments) and people as this issue is now affecting every core of life due to frequent fluctuation in weather trends. Expansion of flooding areas, heavy and untimely snowfall in Europe and other parts of the earth are some examples such as floods in Leh a cold desert of India in 2010.

Forests contain a substantial part of the planet's carbon; therefore, current rates of forest loss contribute to almost 20 percent of total emissions of carbon dioxide. Climate change and forests are intrinsically linked: climate change is a threat to forests, and protecting forests from conversion and degradation helps mitigate the impacts of climate change.

We as an organization, engage in many ways to fight this particular problem and to ensure sustainability of the mountains by engaging rural hill communities in decision making and building their capacities along with improvement in their awareness level. The effort of CHEA at Lamgara to educate and train the local community is one such example that has been mentioned in the Mission Document of National Mission of Green India, an ambitious Mission of Ministry of Environment and Forestry, Government of India (GoI). They underline the effort and usefulness of strengthening local community institutions by Building a cadre of community youth for ecosystem restoration as a Means to achieve Mission Target which quotes "Given the fast changing rural scenario with increase in the number of educated unemployed/underemployed youth, the Mission would support development of youth cadres to lead the charge at the local level. Support of research institutions, universities/colleges from local area, Forest Department and NGOs would help develop this cadre as Self Employed Change Agents (SECA). The example of the Carbon assessment project in Lamgarha block in Uttarakhand proves the point that rural educated youth are quick to pick up skills, and have huge potential to provide support to the community in planning, implementation and monitoring of the greening program at the local level . The cadre of community youths will help Mission activities at the local level with active support of FD and other agencies. This will also augment capacity of Forest Department to facilitate Mission activities with existing regular staff."