Unpacking Three Decades Of Restoration In The Western Himalayas

A review of restoration interventions in the Western Himalayas over the last three decades outlines the unique challenges of restoring this landscape.

“We tried to pull in as much content as we could on anybody doing any kind of restoration work in the Western Himalayas, to analyse the trends and gaps in the restoration ecology of the region,” Aashra Iype, lead author of the paper, said. Iype, a research assistant with the Nature Conservation Foundation, has worked in Himachal Pradesh for multiple years and is keenly aware of the restoration efforts in the region.

In this systematic review, Iype and her colleagues from the Nature Conservation Foundation analysed 100 peer-reviewed and grey literature articles on restoration in the Western Himalayas from January 1990 to February 2024.

The Western Himalayas is defined in the study as the Himalayan region west of Nepal, spanning two Indian states and two union territories: Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir, and Ladakh.

According to the review, Uttarakhand had the most interventions, with more than 93% of forest restoration initiatives (restoration of deforested or degraded forest landscapes) in the region being reported from the state. In contrast, Himachal Pradesh showed a strong focus on afforestation activities (tree planting in historically non-forested areas). Most of them were government-managed, meaning there was minimal participation from the local communities.

Conversely, Ladakh’s afforestation interventions were led by private or community collectives. There was a clear motivation from the community to introduce more green spaces, but a lack of peer-reviewed literature raised concerns about long-term ecological and socio-economic impacts.

Jammu and Kashmir, with the fewest documented interventions, exhibited a wide range of efforts including afforestation, forest restoration and the only case of natural regeneration (allowing for natural recovery by halting drivers of degradation, usually through fencing) among all the states.

What works for the Western Himalayan context?

The study aimed to understand research themes and trends in the objectives of restoration interventions in the region.

While restoration initiatives in the larger Indian Himalayan region have been reviewed before, the Western Himalayas have lacked focus, the researcher shared. “Let’s take a step back, re-evaluate and course-correct a little so that we’re not doing more bad than good,” Iype said.

The primary research themes among publications were “restoration techniques”, followed by “stakeholder engagement” and “monitoring and evaluation.”

“There’s been a huge jump in people experimenting with restoration techniques and trying to figure out what works for the Western Himalayan context,” Iype said.

“[Although] people are attempting a more nuanced form of restoration, which involves monitoring, evaluation and stakeholder engagement, it has not culminated into a larger movement,” she noted.

Regarding restoration intervention objectives, the study identified disaster and water resilience as “under-explored.” With cloud bursts and landslides increasing, restoration could be mobilised to mitigate natural disasters, suggested Iype.

Prevention is the best method to mitigate landslides, according to Forrest Fleischman, Associate Professor at the Department of Forest Resources, University of Minnesota. “Because of their mountainous nature, the Western Himalayas are inherently prone to landslides and other natural hazards,” Fleischman, who is not a part of the study, noted. “[It requires] careful land use planning by the state or local governments to prevent infrastructure development in vulnerable regions.”

“[But then] there is probably a small role for restoration in disaster resilience”, Fleischman added. “Planting trees or natural grasses or shrubs in areas prone to landslides or flooding could reduce hazard risks.”

Concerning number of non-native species 

One of the “concerning” findings from the review was the extensive planting of species non-native to the Western Himalayas.

“We were looking at any sort of document, anyone who had published anything,” Iype said. “In that larger space, almost half of the species (47.6%) planted in restoration interventions were non-native species.”

Overuse of non-native or exotic species is a problem in the Western Himalayas, according to Fleischman, who has extensively researched restoration in the region. “Exotic species have been shown to have beneficial effects in some restoration projects, but they are overused in many parts of the western Himalayas, where such beneficial effects are not clearly documented,” he said.

With invasive species negatively impacting many parts of the landscape, Fleischman found it curious that invasive species removal wasn’t discussed as a restoration intervention in the study.

Long-term monitoring and community engagement 

A lack of long-term monitoring efforts and participation from local communities were identified as the primary challenges for restoration interventions in the region.

“Anytime we set about doing restoration or any intervention to rehabilitate the land, they should come with certain objectives,” Iype said. “These objectives then have a set of outcomes that should be measured so that we can evaluate whether the intervention achieved its objective.”

As restoration becomes more and more collaborative, with practitioners all over the globe sharing insights, not measuring or monitoring the outcomes of restoration intervention renders them less replicable, Iype added.

“Monitoring not only helps in understanding our mistakes and course-correcting, but it also helps the overall community learn from our mistakes and share valuable insights,” she added.

Though Fleischman agrees, he believes community engagement to be more important. “[Western Himalayas] is a densely inhabited landscape, and restoration that occurs without community engagement in this context is unlikely to be successful,” he said.

“Be it choosing the land where you want to plant or deciding what species to plant, the community should be a collaborative partner,” Iype said. It also extends to monitoring efforts, she added. “In a place like Himachal [Pradesh] that can be difficult to access at different times of the year, if we can mobilise the local community, they can help monitor and maintain the site.”

(Published under Creative Commons from Mongabay India. Read the original article here)