Sustainable Livelihood and Economic Linkages in India's Forest Policy

Sustainable Forest Policy is of extreme importance in our present world where a spiral of rapid economic growth causing imbalance in the climatic cycles by denying eco-systems sufficient time for adaptation and socio-economic systems adequate opportunity for mitigation. Here forests are considered highly resilient natural resource that plays a major role in protecting this fragile environment through carbon sequestration, heat absorption, watershed protection, acid deposition, etc. This book examines the prospect of sustainable forest management (SFM) for an emerging economy like India, where forest coverage has gone up over the last three decades in spite of population growth, rapid urbanization and fast economic progress. The extent of ecological stress on Indian economy has been examined in terms of demand-supply balancing at the macro-level and ecological sustainability through biodiversity conservation as well as livelihood protection at the micro-level. The results reveal increasing dominance of economic aspect over others indicating necessity of designing intervention strategies to decouple economic growth from forest resources to ensure long run sustainability.