Living Land

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Reclaiming degraded lands and building resilience

to climate change in Maharashtra, India

Dr Marcella D’souza, Executive Director and Karan Misquitta, Researcher, Watershed Organisation Trust

Satellite image analysis of the Sangamner cluster project villages shows an increase in the area under vegetation cover

Source: WOTR

rylands constitute 69 per cent of India’s total area.

These are heavily populated regions where the live-

lihoods of the inhabitants are vulnerable as they

depend on a natural resource base that is degraded and

deforested. According to the National Bureau of Soil Survey

and Land Use Planning, an area of 146.82 million hectares

is reported to be suffering from various kinds of land

degradation, with erosion caused by water alone contrib-

uting to about 61.7 per cent and wind erosion contributing

to 10.24 per cent. Much of this is reversible or can be

arrested, as dryland regions and degraded ecosystems can

be significantly improved by participatory and integrated

management of water and natural resources. However,

management of dryland resources must be viewed from the

broader climatic and socioeconomic context.

The Watershed Organization Trust (WOTR) has played an

important role in developing techno-participatory approaches

to watershed development that have proven to significantly

conserve soil and water and improve land productivity.

Importantly, WOTR has always focused on developing scala-

ble and replicable interventions and has directly and indirectly

implemented and supported successful watershed develop-

ment across 83,857 km

in 1,422 villages in seven states of

India, benefiting over 1.2 million people.

However, it has been observed that unless climate change

adaptation is factored into project design, weather variations

will continue to obstruct progress and development. Hence, in

2009WOTR included weather uncertainties into project design.

There follows below an account of the impact in 16 villages, in

the Sangamner Block of Ahmednagar, of a climate change adap-

tation (CCA) project implemented by WOTR and supported

by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC)

and the National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development

(NABARD). The findings described are the results obtained

from various studies, impact assessments and reports.

Ahmednagar district, Maharashtra, lies in the dry semi-arid

rain shadow of the Western Ghats. The land has little biomass

Dec 2008

Dec 2013

Total area: 16,050 ha

iving

and