The Asian Development Bank (ADB) blog titled ‘How Stable Financing and Sustainable Grazing Can Restore Grasslands’ has highlighted that restoring the world’s grasslands—which cover nearly 40% of the Earth’s terrestrial area—requires a shift toward stable, long-term financing and sustainable grazing management. Healthy grasslands function as critical carbon sinks, storing approximately 90% of their carbon underground in deep root systems, making them more resilient to surface disturbances like fire than forests. However, overgrazing and land conversion have led to widespread degradation, releasing stored carbon and threatening the livelihoods of over 800 million people globally.
Core Strategies for Restoration
Sustainable Grazing: Implementing rotational grazing—resting land during critical growth periods—allows vegetation to recover, enhancing soil organic carbon by 10–25% over the medium term.
Innovative Financing: Restoring nature can unlock $10 trillion in business value by 2030. Monetization strategies include Payments for Environmental Services (PES), where land users receive incentives conditional on improved management, alongside green bonds and carbon credits.
Institutional Governance: Moving beyond “forest-centric” climate finance is essential. Current global funds disproportionately target afforestation, often leading to “extinction by afforestation” for open-habitat species.
Policy Relevance
Grasslands in India are at a critical juncture, having declined by 31% between 2005 and 2015 due to mismanagement and a lack of cohesive national policy.
Strategic Impact for India:
National Policy Framework: There is an urgent need for a “National Grassland Policy” and a nodal “National Grassland Authority” to coordinate restoration across 120 million hectares of degraded land.
Revising Land Classification: Shifting from “wasteland” to “Open Natural Ecosystems (ONEs)” in land-use planning is vital to unlock climate finance and protect traditional pastoralist corridors.
Leveraging Carbon Markets: India’s proposed National Rangeland Utilisation Policy can utilize the ADB’s pilot methodologies for measuring soil organic carbon to generate high-value carbon credits for herder communities.
Climate Resilience: Restoration directly supports India’s National Programme on Climate Change, as healthy grass roots act as sponges for groundwater recharge and provide a natural cooling “albedo effect” in semi-arid zones.
Relevant Question for Policy Stakeholders: How can India integrate grassland soil carbon sequestration into its Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) to move toward a more scientifically complete and socially just climate strategy?
Follow the full news here: How Stable Financing and Sustainable Grazing Can Restore Grasslands
