Green India Mission
Also called: National Mission for a Green India · Topic: Climate Change: Causes, Evidence and the Global Response · NCERT: Beyond NCERT
Meaning
The Green India Mission, also called the National Mission for a Green India, is one of the eight missions of India's National Action Plan on Climate Change (NAPCC), launched in 2008. It aims to protect, restore and grow India's forests. It has two targets. The first is to raise forest and tree cover on 5 million hectares. The second is to improve the quality of forests on another 5 million hectares. Healthy forests act as a carbon sink, meaning they take in more carbon dioxide than they give out. This helps slow warming. Forests also help people adapt to climate change, because they protect soil, water and the livelihoods of forest communities.
Example
India's Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) is its climate pledge under the Paris Agreement. It aims to create an extra forest carbon sink of 2.5–3 billion tonnes of CO2-equivalent by 2030. Adding new tree cover and making thin, damaged forests healthy again under the Green India Mission is one of the main ways India plans to meet this goal.
Don't confuse with
- Green Credit Programme (2023): it gives credits as a reward for voluntary actions such as tree planting. The Green India Mission is a government mission under the NAPCC.
- MISHTI (2023): it deals only with planting mangroves along the coast. The Green India Mission covers forests and tree cover across the country.
Related concepts
- National Action Plan on Climate Change
- National Solar Mission
- National Mission for Sustaining the Himalayan Ecosystem
- Panchamrit
- Carbon Credit Trading Scheme