A joint venture between state government and XLRI School of
Business and Human Resources has been made with a view to introduce and conduct
a two-day programme on governance for sustainable forest management. This will
help to match international practices followed with functioning of
forest-personnel here.
On Monday, started the first programme, about capacity building of forest officers. There is a series of four programmes. It was attended by forest officials of the state participating in a variety of forest-related topics.
On inaugural day of the event, several topics such as Sustainable development and global sustainable development goals, managing forests for ecosystem services, poverty removal and compensatory afforestation fund management and planning authority (CAMPA) provisions were discussed.
How to manage stress and building team for effective decision making are the topics to be discussed in detail on December 22nd, the second and concluding day.
Dr Madhukar Shukla, chairperson of Fr Arrupe Center for Ecology and Sustainability emphasized the fact that today in the 21st century, forest department needs to look after the stakeholders (both local and global) through new techniques which will finally lead to sustainable development. In order to improve the efficiency of forest governance with emerging policies, it's important that skills of forest personnel are developed at all levels to cope up with these changes.
Another senior official mentioned clearly that in order to achieve sustainable development, forest personnel who is at the field needs to be well educated and informed. This was in light of the programme introduced.
One of the participants and IFS officer said that it is important that our officials are well informed as recently many policies (National and international) have came into place for improving the forests as this is the need of the hour.
The program which lasted two days needs to be viewed in the background of the landmark publication "Millennium Ecosystem Assessment" under the auspices of United Nations in 2005, quoted one of the faculties.