气候变化领域集成服务门户

Heavy logging during the British colonial era and replanting with a single species—fast-growing pine—weakened forest health. Now, locals are making room for more oaks to regrow.

Parwara, IndiaIn the Himalayan foothills of northern India, Vimla Bisht spends nearly every day gathering dry pine needles from the parched forest into a giant cloth sack, which she balances on her head for the long trek back home. She uses the needles to bed her cattle, though she collects them to safeguard her village against the drought’s side effects: fire.

Bisht, 32, lives in Parwara, a settlement of about 1,300 people that lies at 7,000 feet in the central Himalayas. Seasonal fires there have grown more ferocious as climate change remakes that landscape. Bisht and her neighbors serve as part of the front line in the effort to prevent the kinds of infernos that now occur yearly in Australia and California.

 “We have not seen such furious forest fires before,” she says. “So, we now try to clear the forest floor of this menace as much as we can.”

But climate change isn't the only reason this landscape has become more fire prone. For more than a century, beginning in the late 1800s under British colonial rule, the native oak forests here were heavily logged, in part to build India's vast railway network. Over time the forests were replanted with fast-growing pine trees, with their highly flammable needles.

The effort to tidy the forest is one of a number of similar small restorative programs run by rural entrepreneurs in the region. Local campaigns—some successful—are underway to restore the native oak forests that largely have been replaced by pine and, for those collecting pine needles, a bioenergy nonprofit buys them to burn in eight small plants that generate clean electricity throughout the state of Uttarakhand, Parwara’s home state.

“This is small—micro-micro small—but the most important point here is that this electricity is coming out of the destructive energy of pine needles,” says Rajnish Jain, co-founder of the nonprofit, Avani. “This is helping clear up the forest floors, prevent forest fires, and conserve biodiversity.” 

Fire season in the Himalayas begins in late fall and extends through spring until the monsoon rains begin. So far this winter, the erratic weather has delivered heavy snowfall, a relief compared to 2020, when fires that began in October burned continuously through April of 2021. But no one expects this year’s good weather fortune to last, and it’s still so early enough in the season that fire could occur before the rains begin.

Wildfires are not new to these foothills, but their frequency and the damage they cause have increased significantly in the last decade. Many experts called the 2020-2021 fire season the worst in a decade as more than 1,000 fires burned in the heavily forested Uttarakhand, which shares international borders with Nepal and China.

According to the European Union's Copernicus Atmospheric Monitoring Service (CAMS), the Uttarakhand forest fires emitted 0.2 megatons of carbon in just one month last year, the highest since 2003. Soot from the fires has also made its way to the high Arctic, sometimes in less than a week.

Aside from the warming climate, the region’s vulnerability to fire is caused in part by profound changes to the forests, which date to the 19th century and the British colonial period, when broadleaf oak forests were heavily logged by settlers and then replaced with fast-growing pine.