Key Highlights of COP-14

• Presidency: India will be taking over the COP presidency from China for the next two years until the next COP is hosted in 2021.
• Participants: At least 5,000 delegates from nearly 197 countries will be participating in the event which will be held between 29th August to 14th September 2019 at India Expo Mart Limited, Greater Noida.
• Function: One of the primary functions of COP-14 is to review reports submitted by the Conference of Parties to the convention and detail how they are carrying out their commitments.
• India’s Land Degradation Problems: India faces a severe problem of land degradation (meaning the soil becoming unfit for cultivation). The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) in its 2016 report found that over 29% of India’s land (in 2011-2013) was degraded which was a 0.57% increase from years 2003-2005.

India’s Flagship Project:

• Ahead of COP-14, PrakashJavadekar, Union Minister of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC) has launched a flagship project which is a part of a larger international initiative called ‘Bonn Challenge’.
• It is aimed at enhancing India’s capacity for Forest Landscape Restoration (FLR). During the pilot phase of the project (initial 3.5 years), it will be implemented in Haryana, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Nagaland, and Karnataka. Initially, the project will be aimed at developing and adopting best practices and monitoring protocols for the country, and building capacity within 5 pilot States. Later, it will eventually be scaled up across the country through subsequent phases of the project. The project will be implemented by MoEFCC in partnership with the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

Bonn Challenge

• It is a global effort towards bringing 150 million hectares of the world’s degraded and deforested land under restoration by the year 2020 and 350 million hectares by 2030.
• At COP-13 (2015) in Paris, India also joined the voluntary Bonn Challenge pledge and had committed to restoring 13 million hectares (MH) of degraded and deforested land by the year 2020, and an additional 8 million hectares (MH) by 2030. India’s pledge is one of the largest in Asia.