One of the key threats faced by the forest landscape in the SKC in Maharashtra is deforestation. For addressing deforestation, AERF scaled up the successful incentive based conservation approach. AERF signed conservation agreements with local communities to ensure long term and participatory conservation of private forests at new priority sites and also up-scaled agreements at earlier sites. Conservation agreements were proposed as a conservation strategy for villages having good forest cover identified near CEPF priority sites and based on preliminary survey of the forests in these villages.
A typical conservation agreement lasts for five to ten years. Once agreed for joint efforts to protect and conserve AERF helps owners and groups of owners to develop and pilot-test range of innovative conservation ideas. Cash incentives upon signing the agreements, employment to couple of youth from villages as Forest watchers and continuous capacity building for conservation are the main elements of building harmony. Biodiversity monitoring with communities is another key feature of the conservation agreement programme that helps maintain communities interest and build their capacity to understand the forests.
For demonstrating the benefits of biodiversity and tree cover, AERF helped harnessthe significant potential of medicinal plants and discouraged destructive harvesting practices.
AERF promoted sustainable collection of selected medicinal plants using the protocol of certification schemes such as FAIRWILD . It would add value to resource, create a steady and sustainable revenue stream and make NTFP collection economically attractive to the local people. The monitoring of sustainable collection was carried out by trained community members and representative of Pukka Herbs who has extensive experience in preparing management plan for sustainable collection of medicinal plants and has also visited proposed collection sites.
AERF also contributed to participatory conservation of selected sacred groves at priority sites in SKC. AERF promotes culturally acceptable non-invasive collection of commercially important NTFP species from sacred groves. Similarly, AERF offered trainings to local youth in operating GPS, bird identification, monitoring of nests and other similar acitvities and also offers them employment in conservation enterprise.
AERF carried out mapping and valuation of ecosystem services of Sacred groves for securing long term conservation of these key biodiversity areas.
Continuous support and increasing constituency are the key factors to any successful conservation initiative. AERF has been constantly engaging with the private sector for promoting investment in biodiversity conservation in the SKC. AERF could engage successfully with companies such as Innoventive Industries, Praj , Pukka Herbs and Credit Suisse. Of these, Praj, Pukka Herbs and Innoventive Industries made financial commitments for supporting conservation agreement approach to avoid deforestation while AERF started working with Credit Suisse for volunteer engagement. AERF also made significant effort for making biomass briquette manufacturing biodiversity sensitive.
