Climate change resilience: can Joint Forest Management help Indian forest and communities?

Abstract

The impacts of climate change are already being felt in developing countries like India, making its people and natural resources extremely vulnerable. In order to tackle such changes, it is important to take adaptive measures. The article does a literature review of the impacts of climate change on India and its forests. It also reviews literature across discipline of sustainable development and social-ecology that argue for the use of resilience framework as a way to tackle climate change for complex systems. Resilience framework is a promising way to manage complex social and ecological systems. Due to the nature and scale of adaptation strategies, institutions like Community Based Natural Resource Management (CBNRM) are being projected to increase adaptation at the local level. Joint Forest Management (JFM) as a type of CBNRM has become an obvious choice for the Government of India to increase adaptation at the local level. This article evaluates the potential of JFM in delivering adaptive strategies at the local level. However, JFM in its current state needs modification and unless modified it will be unable to create resilience. Increasing legal rights and ownership over resources along with creating networks enabling knowledge and resource sharing have been identified as the main strategies to increase the effectiveness of JFM.