Restoring landscapes can offer tangible benefits for people, nature, and climate – creating livelihoods, providing food and nutritional security, enhancing the flow of ecosystem services, and contributing to climate mitigation, adaptation, and resilience. Over 100 million hectares of land in India offers the potential for forest protection and landscape restoration, as identified in WRI India’s Restoration Opportunities Atlas. The state of Madhya Pradesh has immense potential for forest protection and landscape restoration of over 20 million hectares (mha), specifically for mosaic restoration (in a patch work of land uses) in 13 mha. This further underscores the need for landscape planning for unlocking the restoration potential of Madhya Pradesh starting with a pilot in Sidhi district.  

Sidhi district exemplifies the environment and development challenges that are persistent across underdeveloped and poor districts in India. With 50% of its population depending on forests and farmlands for sustenance, high exposure to extreme climatic events increases the socio-economic vulnerability for most of Sidhi’s people. WRI India adapted the widely applied Restoration Opportunities Assessment Methodology (ROAM) to the Indian context to assess the potential for landscape restoration in the Sidhi district in 2020, highlighting that over 300,000 hectares (ha) can be restored primarily outside forest areas, that can create jobs for 30,000 people in Sidhi and generate INR 710 million through wage income and development of value chains around six key tree species.

Despite the proven potential of restoration, government commitments, and enabling policies, the implementation of restoration interventions has been sub-optimal and continues to face several challenges, such as lack of business models, value chains, access to good quality planting material, policy and regulatory gaps, and poor technical capacity and knowledge of restoration implementers.  The lack of coordination between government departments also makes it difficult for local restoration champions (non-governmental organizations and small- and medium-sized enterprises) to access opportunities for support, leaving them eager to act but lacking the capacity to scale up their work.  

Strategy for Landscape Restoration in Sidhi

To address these barriers and demonstrate landscape restoration as a potential nature-based solution for climate risk mitigation and adaptation, a pilot cluster of 13 villages (~9,000 ha) was prioritized for landscape restoration implementation in 2021, through HSBC’s support under the Climate Solutions Partnership. WRI India collaborated with the Department of Panchayat and Rural Development (DP&RD), Government of Madhya Pradesh (GoMP), Sidhi District Administration, and the local implementation partner, Action for Social Advancement, to operationalize findings from Sidhi’s landscape restoration assessment study and implement restoration interventions in an integrated landscape approach.  

With an overarching aim to harmonize efforts at the landscape-scale and bring coherence to restoration-related schemes in the district, the Sidhi landscape restoration project encompassed various restoration interventions including water resource management, soil and moisture conservation, tree-based restoration interventions, and enhancing livelihoods by establishing value chain for bamboo and other agriculture products through a farmer producer company established under the project. Additionally, nutrition gardens were promoted with a focus on sustainable agricultural practices to improve nutritional security amongst the local community, especially women. This has resulted in direct benefits for communities in the pilot area through flow of ecosystem services, such as provision of food, fodder, timber, water recharge, and other forest produce (such as mahua- Madhuca longifolia and bamboo), while conserving the natural biodiversity.  

To maximize on-ground impact and bridge technical gaps, capacity building of stakeholders involved in project planning and execution was undertaken, including members of the panchayati raj Institutions, self-help groups, water user groups and representatives of government departments from the District Administration, Sidhi. To monitor the efficacy of the interventions, the project also designed participatory monitoring of landscape restoration by local community members through a Citizen Science App developed by WRI India that has been used to collect data, including geolocation information and geotagged photographs, using customizable survey forms tailored to specific restoration interventions. The Sidhi landscape restoration project’s multi-scalar governance modality has effectively combined top-down and bottom-up approaches, enabling strong feedback and smooth implementation. Led by Sidhi District Administration at the district level and guided by a state-level Steering Committee, the project has remained resilient to administrative changes and maintained momentum. Regular reviews by senior leadership, including the former Additional Chief Secretary of DP&RD, have positioned Sidhi as a ‘model’ for implementing nature-based solutions. Encouraged by its success, efforts are now underway to replicate the Sidhi model across other districts in Madhya Pradesh.  

Landcape Restoration in Sidhi

This pilot project in the Sidhi district showcased a pathway to scale and replicate restoration efforts across the state by highlighting the role played by government departments at the district and block level under the leadership of Sidhi District Administration along with civil society organizations for implementing restoration solutions. This project enabled systematic streamlining of previously fragmented restoration efforts, synergistic convergence of public funds through DP&RD and Forest Department in Madhya Pradesh and successfully established positive feedback loops between the implementation experience and policy-level interventions, overcoming barriers to restoration.  

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