Without the Inclusion of the Northeast, India’s Climate Policy Risks Failing

As COP29 was being held in Baku, the world’s attention shifted to implementing Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, which aims to unlock the potential of global carbon markets and encourage collaborative mitigation mechanisms. Article 6 can change the climate action landscape by allowing countries to trade carbon credits, making meeting Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) easier.

India, too, is developing its own carbon market, and it is likely that the country will advocate for finalised Article 6 rules that enable transparent and effective participation in international carbon markets. Furthermore, India may advocate for the New Collective Quantified Goal (NCQG) on climate finance to prioritise concessional financing tailored to the needs of developing countries.

Despite these global negotiations and lofty commitments, India’s climate policy risks failing to address socio-ecological nuances, particularly along its North-Eastern frontier. The Prime Minister’s Panchamrit pledge at COP26 and the overarching goal of achieving net-zero emissions by 2070 prioritise resource efficiency and decarbonisation, which primarily benefit industrial hubs.

These policies may appear distant and disconnected from the Northeast India’s distinct ecological and cultural dimensions.

In the Northeast, land is more than just a resource; it is deeply connected to indigenous identity and ecological stewardship. indigenous communities, which manage more than 21% of India’s forests and natural resources, play critical roles in climate adaptation and biodiversity conservation. India’s policies risk becoming one-sided without incorporating their perspectives into national climate strategies, with Delhi speaking and the Northeast remaining silent.

The disconnect between Centre’s policies and local realities

The state tends to “see” as a mechanised entity, viewing society through a reductionist lens, reaching for homogenisation rather than accommodating the labyrinthine details of local intricacy. Indeed, nowhere does this have more far-reaching implications than on India’s northeastern frontier, where indigenous communities are said to be caught within an intimate interdependence between culture and ecology – a precept disregarded mainly in the centralised climate policy of India.

The northeastern states of India, home to about 45 million people with over 8 per cent of the country’s land area, shelter one of the richest biomes in the world, representing the densest rainforests, sacred groves, and wetland ecosystems.

Not only are these biodiversity hotspots, but they are also crucial for crucial functions of the ecosystem including sustaining local communities and more extensive environmental health. For example, the Kaziranga National Park in Assam is a UNESCO World Heritage site which is not only famous for its population of the Indian rhinoceros but also epitomises the interrelationship between the local community and the ecosystem, especially the anti-poaching initiative, which is often driven by locals, mainly tribals.

Here, traditional ecological knowledge and sacred rites are not ornamental or peripheral but rather the very framework upon which conservation has historically rested. To the communities of Meghalaya, Manipur, and Nagaland, among others, nature is not a commodity but part of the sacred entity, stitched into the everyday through festivals, land rituals, and communal forest management.

In Nagaland State, for example, over 89% of the forests are community-managed, and the trust is on local custodianship rather than externally issued directives. This model of governance rhymes with the indigenous practice of “mange,” wherein areas are kept aside during certain times of the year, reflecting an intimate knowledge of ecological cycles. It is in this aspect that external policies that don’t involve the local population fall short.

The climate policies of India, engineered in the planning offices of Delhi, quantify the success of conservation through markers such as carbon offset goals, renewable energy targets, and emissions reductions. Yet, they are almost oblivious to the organic ways of Northeast India’s tradition of conservation – a practice not fettered by any legislative codes but consolidated across generations through mutual respect between people and nature.

The same forests now being exploited for wood and minerals were once regulated by collective rituals, such as the practice of maintaining sacred groves among the Khasi community in Meghalaya, which were conserved by ancestral belief systems rather than state decrees.

Respect for groves among the Khasi is deeply steeped in their cosmology, where a tree is thought to protect ancestral spirits that inform moral land use and guarantee the sustainable replenishment of stocks.

However, that reality is lost under the present climate policies, which look at the Northeast not as an ecological community but as a minor appendage to national carbon metrics and resource potential. In dismissing this indigenous custodianship for the market-oriented model of conservation, the state risks losing ecological degradation and erosion in the cultural fabric of the Northeast.

In case anyone is still blind, large-scale hydroelectric projects are being pushed in the region under the excuse of renewable energy without paying heed to the plight of indigenous people whose livelihood and religious functions depend on a river system, as evident in the wide-scale resistance to the Tipaimukh Dam project in Manipur.

It is more than simply an administrative failure; it represents a critical misunderstanding of the relationship between indigenous communities and their respective environments. Policies developed without local input weaken conservation efforts and risk displacing traditional knowledge systems that have safeguarded these ecosystems for generations.

This approach forces communities to face policies that commodify the very lands they have preserved for centuries, widening the gap between centralized policy and the vibrant, lived realities of the Northeast.

Capitalism, globalisation, and environmental degradation in the Northeast

In India, economic and political priorities, propelled by capitalism and globalisation, have acted more as forces of division than as protectors of delicate ecosystems. A rationalist, profit-driven state agenda has steadily transformed landscapes, converting sacred forests into profitable lumber lots, rich farmlands into extractive fields, and vital rivers into resources for hydroelectric and commercial use.

For example, logging companies have encroached upon the borders of Namdapha National Park in Arunachal Pradesh– a biodiversity treasure – without regard for ecological balance or indigenous rights. Once-vibrant forests are reclassified simply as “timber.”

At the same time, rivers like the Dibang, which have sustained communities for centuries, are now viewed as “resources” for hydroelectric projects, often at the cost of both local people and critical ecosystems.

This shift toward commodification has replaced indigenous practices of coexistence with a model of relentless extraction, driving deforestation and biodiversity loss to unprecedented levels of environmental degradation. Compounding this fragility are recent climate disruptions. This year, erratic, intense rainfall has ravaged the Northeast, triggering flash floods and landslides that displaced thousands across Assam, Meghalaya, and Mizoram.

In July, Assam alone saw floods impacting over 2 million people, devastating homes and farmland and spotlighting lives balanced precariously within these ecosystems. Cyclones like the one that hit in recent months underscore this fragility, destroying infrastructure and livelihoods in Mizoram and Manipur, where farmers relying on seasonal rains saw crops destroyed by floodwaters.

The irony is stark: while the Northeast stands as one of India’s critical ecological reserves, its exclusion from national climate policy exposes it to the dual forces of extractive policies and an escalating climate crisis. Forests, once filled with the sounds of wildlife, now echo with the crash of trees felled for profit, and rivers roar with erosion from unchecked industrial development. In places like Meghalaya, rampant coal mining has severely polluted water sources and degraded soil.

This mechanistic, rationalist state vision dismisses the Northeast’s ecological intricacies, hastening its destruction under the banner of “development.” For instance, Loktak Lake in Manipur, which supports a unique biodiversity and local fishing communities, is severely threatened by invasive species and pollution due to unregulated development and industrial runoff.

By allowing development to consider policies of short-term economic gains over the sustainable use of resources, the wisdom of indigenous communities that have lived in harmony with ecosystems for generations becomes disconnected from the development narratives and realities on the ground faced by the local population.

The implication of this extractive paradigm goes beyond the immediate environmental degradation to the corrosion of the cultural and social fibre of the Northeast, which pushes these communities into a dependency loop of unsustainable practices that threaten to destroy their very existence.

In that scenario, the challenges wrought by globalisation and the expansion of capitalism are not simply environmental but fundamentally social, and the vulnerabilities this creates in a region considered vital for India’s ecological future are heavily accentuated in degree.

The policy blind spot: A failure of governance

There is a peculiar blindness with which ecological, climate, and governance policies play out in the Northeast – a region whose deep ecological wealth and indigenous environment-friendly practices are often reduced to mere footnotes within the national frameworks.

Ambitious conservation, reforestation, and climate resilience targets are articulated under policies such as the National Action Plan on Climate Change, the Green India Mission, and the Forest Rights Act. They subsequently bring little cultural resonance with the Northeast, where ecological practices are inseparable from social identities and traditional knowledge. This lack of alignment alienates the local stakeholders and drives policy inefficacy, increasing misuse or active resistance to the policies’ intended aims.

Climate policy in India reflects a classic “high-modernist” bias in assuming that there might exist a universal, rational way to govern the varied landscapes of the entire nation. In this process, the “one-size-fits-all” model neglects socio-ecological systems foundational to local resilience in the Northeast, where communities have preserved biodiversity by customary land practices such as jhum or shifting cultivation, in addition to sacred groves.

For instance, the conservation of the sacred groves of Meghalaya for centuries, according to tribal laws, showcased biodiversity hotspots and climate regulation. However, the Green India Mission considers such areas mere conservation sites and thus recommends that afforestation – eucalyptus plantations are bound to replace native species, drawing nutrient content out of the soil and disrupting the water cycle, thereby dislocating communities from natural habitats.

Also Read: Climate Change – Especially in the Northeast – Must Be Discussed in Parliament

Projects such as the Integrated Watershed Management Programme (IWMP) and Sustainable Agriculture and Water Conservation have misguided this region’s policy project. They have proposed “improved” land-use techniques, such as terracing and monocropping, which are contoured as feasible elsewhere in the country.

Still, they plug entirely into the steep terrains and complicated ecosystems of the Northeast. While nearly 70% of the forests in Nagaland are managed by the community, these state-driven initiatives disregard the fact that jhum cultivation – often maligned as backward – plays an essential role in soil fertilisation, biodiversity promotion, and water flow regulation.

The rotational farming method, for instance, has contributed much in the Dzüko Valley to the perpetuation of local food systems and the preservation of native flora and fauna, which include the endangered Blyth’s tragopan, far more than externally imposed “modern” agricultural techniques could.

Further, the Forest Rights Act (FRA), developed to empower tribal communities through securing land rights, has ironically proved contentious in the Northeast. While the Act does give some recognition to indigenous claims over land, the application’s bureaucratic eligibility criteria entirely ignore local governance structures in traditional land management practices.

In Manipur, for example, villages are governed collectively through customary councils; the rigid application procedure and individual documentation requirements undermine collective land rights, as this causes disputes within the community and creates vulnerabilities for commercial land acquisition. It has been understood as an imposition from the outside, rather than a protection, against the claims of the indigenous groups over their natural resources.

This top-down uniformity not only erodes the effectiveness of such policies but also acts as a fundamental misrecognition of the cultural landscape of the Northeast. The imposition of targets for afforestation, mechanised agriculture, and centrally controlled resource management frameworks suppress the idea that ecosystems in the Northeast are both ecologically unique and socially embedded. For this reason, policies with more intrusive impositions than collaborative frameworks are bound to fail.

The strategy adopted by India regarding climate change has looked at the Northeast only through the prism of cultural code and nuance for its environmental sensitivity. For a strong national response to climate change, it needs to save and conserve these topographies by tapping the local population’s traditional knowledge.

This lack of representation equates to losing ecological security within the Northeast. It acts as a sign that with the involvement of locals in the climate strategy, especially in a part of the earth perceived as being as ecologically sensitive as the Northeast; the endeavour will surely succeed.

The Northeast’s critical role in national climate strategy

What is at stake here is not simply negligence on the part of India towards the ecological wealth of the Northeast but a more profound and graver oversight regarding a missed opportunity to tap into the region’s unique biodiversity and carbon-rich resources.

This region, therefore, serves as a solid ecological barrier, something which the Indian state has not yet fully appreciated as being an asset, given its hosting of more than 26 per cent of India’s total forest cover and an astonishing 8,000 species of flora and fauna that are not found in any other forests.

Think of the sacred forests of Meghalaya, lands that communities have managed to preserve for centuries, where thick canopies and undisturbed undergrowth capture carbon with efficiencies far higher than those achieved by monoculture plantations. These are not just areas of forests; they form part of the cultural heritage – a sanctuary wherein conservation cannot be divorced from the life of the communities.

Looking at these forests from Delhi through the lens of statistical targets and policy metrics is to miss the nuance of a deeply integrated ecological and cultural system. For example, studies suggest that each hectare of forest in Arunachal Pradesh absorbs more than 15 tons of CO₂ annually, or at a rate far exceeded by few other parts of India because of the biodiversity and density of its old-growth forests.

However, such a detail remains in the background when climate policies are formulated at the Centre, with schemes such as the Green India Mission paying little heed to the role of these forests in national climate stability.

Ecosystems in the Northeast are not just isolated pockets of biodiversity but also keystone regulators of the monsoon cycle, affecting rainfall patterns well beyond their boundaries. Changes in forest cover in the Northeast have recently been responsible for the irregular timing of the monsoons across the Gangetic plains, with most of the cascading ramifications on agricultural productivity in states such as Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.

It acts as a natural metronome for India’s monsoon rhythms. It is not a bureaucratic oversight but a systemic weakening of India’s climate resilience.

But for a country whose leadership sets such rhetoric to embrace sustainable development so high, the mere exclusion of the ecological contribution of the Northeast reflects the serious challenge of disconnection. The forests here are watched over with constant care and guarded by the indigenous communities – not just as resources but as living extensions of their identity and heritage.

India’s National Climate Strategy must recognise the traditional knowledge systems of the Northeast, treating these lands not as peripheral landscapes but as essential pillars of the nation’s environmental health. Ignoring this ecological connection risks destabilising the Northeast and the ecological balance of the entire Indian subcontinent.

Without involvement of the Northeast, India’s global ambitions will falter

In a significant breakthrough, all countries at  last month’s COP29 agreed on carbon credit quality standards, a critical step towards establishing a UN-backed global carbon market. This development can potentially increase climate finance and promote greater international cooperation. However, some negotiators are still critical of the process, citing equitable access and governance concerns.

Countries such as Ghana, Switzerland, and Thailand have already made progress under Article 6.2’s bilateral agreements by approving and transferring carbon credits. Meanwhile, the newly agreed-upon technical standards are expected to boost the global carbon market mechanism outlined in Article 6.4.

For India, this platform provides an opportunity to advocate for a climate finance model that prioritises grants and concessional loans over private investments, ensuring that developing countries are not burdened with debt while receiving equitable financial assistance.

However, this opportunity will be lost if the Northeast is not taken into account as India advocates for a favourable climate model.

A call for integration: Valuing indigenous knowledge

India’s rush toward climate targets has led to a narrow view of the Northeast, treating it as a peripheral area rather than recognising it as a region rich with ecological and cultural wisdom. This oversight echoes what James Scott described as the “authoritarian high-modernist” approach, where a one-size-fits-all model overlooks the depth of local knowledge.

With its deeply rooted, sustainable land practices, the Northeast challenges such a paradigm. These indigenous practices are not relics of the past but advanced ecological strategies that have safeguarded biodiversity and prevented environmental degradation for centuries.

Take the jhum cultivation system, a rotational farming practice widely used by tribal communities in the Northeast. While often criticised as a deforestation driver from a central policy perspective, studies by the Indian Council of Forestry Research and Education (ICFRE) suggest otherwise.

Jhum contributes minimally to soil degradation and biodiversity loss compared to industrial agriculture, as it allows forest cover to regenerate naturally and boosts soil fertility in ways that monocultures cannot match. Rather than being dismissed, this sustainable cultivation method could serve as a model for low-impact agriculture across India’s ecologically sensitive regions.

Similarly, the Khasi and Garo tribes of Meghalaya provide a compelling example of community-led forest management, maintaining over 76% tree cover – significantly higher than the national average of under 20 per cent in other states. These tribes see forests as communal assets and sacred spaces, acting as stewards rather than owners.

Climate policy could better support sustainable conservation by acknowledging these communities’ land rights and respecting the sovereignty of their traditional practices rather than defaulting to centralized control.

To overlook these indigenous methods is to underestimate the Northeast’s role as a vital climate ally. Although the Ministry of Environment’s National Mission for a Green India sets ambitious afforestation goals, it largely disregards local, community-driven approaches.

This oversight endangers emissions reduction goals and ecological integrity. By engaging indigenous communities as active co-creators of policy, India could cultivate a climate strategy that values ecological diversity as a strength. Embracing these partnerships would enhance resilience and sustainability and redefine diversity as an asset rather than a challenge to be managed.

A shared future to achieve net-zero emissions 

In pursuit of a net-zero future, India’s climate goals risk overshadowing regions such as Northeast India, where indigenous knowledge and love of local communities for the environment are fundamental to the socio-ecological fabric. National frameworks, which are frequently developed in remote power centres and focus on industrial hubs, overlook northeastern communities’ unique contributions and needs.

This oversight reduces the potential of these ecologically rich regions and increases the risk of imposing policies perceived by local stakeholders as extractive or disconnected.

The recent carbon credit quality standards agreement at COP29 represents a watershed moment in global climate action. This milestone represents an opportunity for India to advocate for climate finance models that consider diverse regional realities.

Instead of implementing carbon reduction strategies uniformly, India must adopt an inclusive model that considers regional perspectives, ecological balance, and cultural heritage. Indigenous communities’ sustainable practices provide essential pathways for lowering carbon emissions while promoting inclusivity and resilience.

The Northeast’s status as an ecological stronghold is irreplaceable. Arunachal Pradesh’s forests absorb over 100 million tonnes of CO₂ annually, while Meghalaya’s community-driven drives for conserving the forest showcases sustainable practices aligned with India’s Green Mission. Incorporating these practices into the national framework would strengthen India’s climate strategy, allowing it to balance ambitious emissions targets and its various regions’ cultural and ecological diversity.

As global carbon markets gain traction under Article 6, India has a unique opportunity to take the lead in ensuring that climate finance mechanisms support regionally tailored solutions. Recognising and incorporating the Northeast’s contributions – where forests are revered as sanctuaries and rivers are the lifeblood of communities – can help reimagine climate resilience as a collaborative effort enriched by regional diversity.

Ensuring that the Northeast’s voice is heard in climate policy is critical for India’s pursuit of a truly inclusive and sustainable path to net-zero emissions and a step towards global leadership in equitable climate action.

Incorporating the Northeast’s practices – where forests are revered sanctuaries and rivers are the lifeblood of communities – into the national framework allows India to develop a climate strategy that recognises the diversity and resilience of its landscapes and people. This approach backs India’s emissions targets and reimagines climate resilience as a collaborative effort enriched by regional contributions.

Ensuring that the Northeast’s voice is included in climate policy is critical for India to achieve a truly inclusive and sustainable path to net-zero emissions.