Fig. 1: Map of study area in India. (Thoria is the little red dot in the northwest; map of Thoria Watershed, bottom.)

CGIAR Jan. 8 2024

By Upeksha Hettiarachchi, Zhe Guo, Wei Zhang

International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI)

A wealth of publicly available satellite data and open-source models allowed researchers to measure carbon stocks in a watershed in India, despite a paucity of on-the-ground data. They found that despite rapid urbanization over the last 20 years, carbon stocks remained relatively stable – possibly due to successful reforestation activities. The research points to how nature-positive solutions can be designed and measured at scale. The research also lays the foundation for global studies to promote a deeper understanding of ecosystem services and sustainable land management.

Commons provide many ecosystem services that support the livelihoods of billions around the world but their economic (and non-economic) contribution to people and nature are rarely assessed. As part of the effort to support the Promise of Commons initiative led by the Foundation for Ecological Security (FES) in India, a collaborative research team comprised of FES, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and other CGIAR centers has been examining the linkages between commons and ecosystem services.

As land fragmentation grows and degradation worsens in the climate change crisis, local households in India increasingly depend on common lands to meet their food, domestic and productive needs. A recent study using value transfer method estimated that the average value of ecosystem services provided by land commons in India, which cover 66.5 million hectares, was $90.5 billion per year (range $24 – 192 billion).

Such findings about the economic contribution of land commons need to be complemented by land use and land cover mapping and ecosystem services modeling to support decision-making about nature-positive land use planning and investment in commons management. This collaborative research began under the CGIAR Research Program on Water, Land and Ecosystems (WLE) and is now continuing under the CGIAR Initiative on Nature-Positive Solutions. The first step is to leverage publicly available satellite data and open-source ecosystem models to explore how land cover changes affect carbon storage, using a case study of the Thoria watershed, located in Rajasthan, India (Fig. 1). By employing a cost-effective method suitable for data scarce contexts, our preliminary analysis uncovers the impact of land cover and land use changes on carbon storage ecosystem service.

See https://www.cgiar.org/news-events/news/can-sustainable-management-of-land-commons-offer-a-nature-positive-solution-initial-insights-from-land-use-based-above-ground-carbon-stock-modeling-in-the-thoria-watershed-india/