Giant Trees for Climate Change Mitigation in India

Dear Supporters,

Greetings from India!

While the whole world is recovering from impacts of COVID-19, we all are looking for sources of strenghts, hope and resilience. It is often the case that we find those in nature. Our field team recently came across some amazing individual specimens of Giant trees in the northern Western Ghats These trees and its inhabitants tell us how to survive and co-exist during a calamity. 

The west coast of Maharashtra, India was hit by Nisarga Cyclone in June this year. It caused unprecendented damage to the assets of local communities and brought misery to millions residing in these areas. The impact of this cyclone on forests and trees in surrounding areas remained completely unknown as they are not part of the mainsteam economy and thus their loss unfortunatley is not considered as economic loss. 

Our teams' survey of these forests came out with some disturbing and some interesting findings. Many of the giant trees while standing tall had lost their canopies, many lost their huge branches which once were roosting sites for many birds and producing fruits in immense numbers. 

Irrespective of these odds, these trees and its inhabitants- birds remained strong and resilient. A highly intriguing case here is of giant specimen of Alstonia scholaris- a native tree of the Western Ghats.

This tree is used for nesting by White rumped vulture- a critically endangered bird and a Great hornbill - a vulnerable species at the same time. Great hornbill in fact is called as farmer of a forests thus its survival is key to health of the surrounding forest.

While it was an amazing finding for our team, it also shows how biased approaches to conservation fail to appreciate the value of the giant trees in saving endangered species.

We are very glad and satisfied with the fact that our approach to conservation is not discrimanatory in nature and thus we are able to appreciate and save these wonders of mother nature.

Your unwavering support to and interest in this initiative is critical for saving these key supporting structures of biodiversity and forests.

Thanks and wish you a very happy Christmas!

Jayant Sarnaik

Dear Supporter,

Hope you are doing well and staying safe in these challenging times of COVID pandemic.

We are truly living in interesting times where everyone across the globe finds oneself in the same situation. We always hear that nature seeks balance but often fail to imagine that Nature can dominate and overpower us so easily.

A small virus is making us rethink about our relationship with nature and our place in this world.

More importantly and something that comes as pleasant surprise is that at this time many nations and big corporations are reworking on their economic models and are committed to invest in green economic recovery.

We also think that this pandemic is an outcome of our attitude to ignore serious warnings given by nature through climate change related events.

The good news is that being supporter of Giant tree campaign, you are certainly making a tangible positve impact not only in mitigating climate change but also helping conserve many important species including Bats.

While lot of misinformation about the role of animals including bats in outbreak of Corona is going around, it is very clear that bats play key role in pollinating many fruit trees that are part of our food system as well as disperse significant amount of seeds of many wild trees and essentially making our forests healthy. 

During our recent and rare field visit ( due to COVID restrictions, we could not travel to the field for about 5 months) , we came across a Giant tree of Syzigium cummuni that was home to a big bat colony.

We had very interesting discussion with the owner of this Giant tree about the history of bats using this tree. We also noticed that saplings of some 10 different tree species had grown very well under the canopy of this giant.

We immediately decided to include this tree in our campaign. Our field team was very alert and found out that for the owner of this tree, wood is still an important source of energy for cooking. We thought that it would be good idea to pay the incentive of the Giant tree conservation program in form of improved cook stove which will reduce the need of collecting wood and pressure on surrounding forests. 

In addition, our field team took every opportunity that was present to carry on the work during the pandemic lockdown and distributed direct incentive among some 40 Giant tree owners already identified during the survey. 

It was a token of recognition of their contribution in keeping these trees standing over generations. Quite a few owners were pleasantly surprised to receive this incentive as they did not imagine that one can receive econimic benefits for also keeping the trees standing.

This generated lot of enthusiasm and then they suggested us to visit other places in the same villages to see the giant trees that our researchers could not map earlier. It turned out to be a big number. Our team tagged new 19 giant trees and rewarded these many new giant tree owners. 

In quite a few cases, the new Giant tree community member is owning as many as 6 large trees which helps us achieve bigger conservation outcome at very reasonable cost.

In other words, the owners of the Giant tree are more happy being part of the campaign and taking pride in it rather than thinking about additional incentive.

This is a very satisfying situation to be in in a world where money is the only parameter that most people associate with value

Take care and stay safe.

Jayant