1. Context

2. About CAMPA Funds

• Establishment in 2004, the Ministry of Environment and Forests constituted the Compensatory Afforestration Fund Management and Planning Authority (CAMPA) to oversee and manage the Compensatory Afforestration Fund (CAF) as directed by the Supreme Court.
• CAMPA Act or Compensatory Afforestation Fund act is an Indian legislation that seeks to provide an appropriate institutional mechanism, both at the centre and in each state and Union Territory, to ensure expeditious utilisation in the efficient and transparent manner of amounts released instead of forest land diverted for the non-forest purpose which would mitigate the impact of diversion of such forest land.

3. Objectives of CAMPA

• Lay down broad guidelines for State CAMPA.
• Facilitate scientific, technological and other assistance that may be required by State CAMPA.
• Make recommendations to State CAMPA based on a review of their plans and programmes.
• Provide a mechanism to State CAMPA to resolve issues of an inter-state or Centre-State character.

4. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

• It is the international body for assessing the science related to climate change.
• It was set up in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) and United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) to provide policymakers with regular assessments of the scientific basis of climate change, its impacts and future risks, and options for adaptation and mitigation.
• IPCC assessments provide a scientific basis for governments at all levels to develop climate-related policies, and they underlie negotiations at the UN Climate Conference- the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

5. What is the Assessment report of the IPCC?

• The Assessment Reports, the first of which had come out in 1990, are the most comprehensive evaluation of the state of the earth's climate.
• Every few years (about 7 years), the IPCC produces assessment reports.
• Hundreds of experts go through every available piece of relevant, published scientific information to prepare a common understanding of the changing climate.
• The four subsequent assessment reports, each thousand of pages long, came out in 1995, 2001, 2007 and 2015. These have formed the basis of the global response to climate change.
• Over the years, each assessment report has built on the work of the previous ones, adding more evidence, information and data. So that most of the conclusions about climate change and its impacts have far greater clarity, certainty and wealth of new evidence now than earlier.
• It is these negotiations that have produced the Paris Agreement, and previously the Kyoto Protocol. The Paris Agreement was negotiated based on the Fifth Assessment Report.

6. Why is afforestation Contested?

• India has committed to adding “an additional (cumulative) carbon sink of 2.5­3 GtCO2e through additional forest and tree cover by 2030”, as part of its climate commitments to the U.N. 
• Afforestation is also codified in the Compensatory Afforestation Fund Management and Planning Authority (CAMPA), a body chaired by the Environment Minister.
• When forest land is diverted to non­forest use, such as building a dam or a mine, that land can longer provide its historical ecosystem services nor host biodiversity.
• According to the Forest (Conservation) Act, of 1980, the project proponent that wishes to divert the land must identify land elsewhere to afforest and pay for the land value and the afforestation exercise. That land will, thereafter, be stewarded by the forest department. 

7. Why does CAMPA matter?

• The money paid sits in a fund overseen by the CAMPA. As of 2019, the fund had ₹47,000 crores.
• The CAMPA has come under fire for facilitating the destruction of natural ecosystems in exchange for forests to be set up in faraway places.

8. How do ecosystems compare to renewable energy?

• The IPCC report also found that the sole option (among those evaluated) with more mitigating potential than "reducing the conversion of natural ecosystems" was solar power and that the third-highest was the wind.
• But many solar parks in India have triggered conflicts with people living nearby because they limit land use and increase local water consumption.
• A 2018 study published in Nature Ecology & Evolution also found that wind farms in the western ghats had reduced the abundance and activity of predatory birds, which consequently increased the density of lizards.
• However, the IPCC report also noted that reducing the conversion of natural ecosystems could be more expensive than wind power, yet still less expensive than ecosystem restoration, afforestation and restoration for every GtCO2e.

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