The Future of Our Forests Workshop: The Problem
CSEI-ATREE and the Biodiversity Collaborative jointly organised a two-day consensus-building workshop on lantana removal and ecological restoration.
This three-part summary collated by CSEI’s Veena Srinivasan, Karishma Shelar, Syamkrishna P. Aryan and Sandeep Hanchanale, and the Biodiversity Collaborative’s Ravi Chellam (Metastring Foundation) is based on discussions held at the workshop.
Other participants were Subhash Gautam, The Real Elephant Collective; Ishan Agarwal, Foundation for Ecological Security; Srinivas Rachakonda, Prakruthi Prerna Foundation; Ruth Defries, Columbia University; Siddappa Setty, ATREE; Jagdish Krishnaswamy (Biodiversity Collaborative), Indian Institute for Human Settlements; Ravikanth G (Biodiversity Collaborative), ATREE; Ravindra (Karnataka Forest Department), Abi Vanak (Biodiversity Collaborative), ATREE; Sheeba Sen, Hasten Ventures; AK Gupta (Biodiversity Collaborative), University of Trans-Disciplinary Health Sciences and Technology; and Aunindo Ghosh (Biodiversity Collaborative).
There is consensus on the severe impacts that Lantana camara inflicts on native plant species and the domino effect it has on habitats, wildlife and people. But there are differences of opinion on how exactly we deal with a problem of this magnitude — lantana is estimated to have taken over 15.5 million hectares (MHa) of the 20 MHa that has been surveyed, and threatens 30 MHa of India’s forests (44%) (Mungi et al. 2020).
To get a clearer understanding of some of the key points of contention and explore ways for stakeholders to collaboratively work together, CSEI-ATREE, along with the Biodiversity Collaborative, organised a two-day consensus-building workshop. Held at the School of Ancient Wisdom in Bengaluru on July 7 and 8, ‘The Future of Our Forests’ brought to the fore multiple perspectives on lantana removal and restoration practices.
Read | Part 2: How Do We Fix It and Part 3: Next Steps
The workshop was attended by 12 experts and was moderated by Rini Dutta of Brand Centric Advisors.
In the run-up to the event, we held in-depth interviews with 17 experts, including ecologists, forest department officials and practitioners, involved in this field to chart the diversity of views on this subject.
These conversations delved into specifics — do we rely on state financing or involve private organisations to fund the removal of lantana, what restoration practices do we focus on, what are the knowledge gaps and how do we involve forest communities? The summary of the interviews and a literature review were compiled and shared as pre-reads with the workshop participants.
To structure the workshop, we stripped back these details and pegged our discussions to five fundamental questions rooted in the points of disagreement that emerged in the preparatory stage. This helped us organise effective debates, geared to answer these big-picture questions, and thus enable us to outline a way forward that is agreeable to the different experts involved in the field.
In this three-part blog series, we will sum up the key insights that we gained from the five sessions. This first part focuses on the problem. We wanted to start the workshop with a basic understanding of how bad the scale of infestation is and what the consequences would be if we stuck to the status quo.
Session 1: Is Lantana Good or Bad?
Are there any circumstances in which we would want lantana to remain or spread in a landscape?
- There was consensus that the lantana invasion is ‘not desirable’ and MUST be removed, though it may not be wise to use the word ‘bad’.
- There is misattribution of impacts, for e.g. increasing tiger populations, birds and barking deer to lantana. But in fact, in most cases, lantana reduces species diversity or favours only generalist species, impacting biodiversity and ecosystem functions.
- Although some communities do use lantana for fuelwood, it was always a less preferred species — a coping mechanism under circumstances beyond the communities’ control.
Overall, a better land-use management strategy with removal of lantana as a critical intervention was advocated.
Session 2: What Will The Forest of The Future Look Like if We Don’t Act?
Is inaction acceptable in all or some places? Can we arrive at a typology/prioritisation of areas where action is most urgently needed?
We separated into groups to discuss the consequences of sticking to the status quo and how prioritise areas.
- Our forests are threatened by several socio-economic, political and ecological factors including lantana, which thrives in certain bioclimatic conditions such as sub-humid areas. Factors like the expansion and shrinkage of area under lantana around riparian zones are critical in prioritisation of forest restoration sites.
- Lantana was recognised as a severe threat to grasslands. Given the scale of lantana presence, removal on slopes should be of low priority to prevent soil erosion and landslides due to extreme rain events.
- With the exception of Shola and evergreen forests which may recover on their own, there was consensus that lantana removal is an essential component of the ecological restoration process.
What was apparent from these two sessions was that removal of lantana is critical for restoration work. It was also evident that there are significant variations in how the weed spreads — in the high rainfall Western Ghats region, lantana occurs in dense thickets within protected areas, and in the semi-arid highlands of central India, lantana grows in low-density as scattered shrubs.
Experts spoke of an urgent need for lantana typology (based on density or genomic characteristics) to be mapped to land ownership type.
In Part 2 of this blog series, we will look deeper into questions about how we address this challenge, spanning from removal and restoration methods to questions about funding, timelines and scalability.
Edited by Kaavya Kumar
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