Union Minister for Environment, Forest and Climate Change Shri Bhupender Yadav presented India's innovative financing architecture for land restoration and drought resilience at the 17th Conference of Parties (CoP17) of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. The Minister emphasized that land restoration represents an investment in food, water, biodiversity, livelihoods and long-term resilience rather than merely a cost, requiring diversified, predictable and sustained finance sources beyond public budgets along with stronger public-private partnerships.
India's blended green-finance framework enables financing for climate-change adaptation, sustainable land use, forestry and agriculture, afforestation and biodiversity conservation. The Minister highlighted Sovereign Green Bonds as a specific avenue to mobilize capital for land restoration, drought resilience, sustainable forestry and other environmental priorities.
The Green Credit Programme enables both public and private entities to finance restoration of degraded forest land, with credits issued after five years of restoration and upon achieving at least 40 percent canopy density. These credits may be used once for compensatory afforestation, statutory plantation or CSR obligations. India's compensatory conservation regime channels payments received for forest diversion toward compensatory afforestation and ecosystem restoration, while corporate funding is integrated through environmental regulatory processes.
Minister Yadav underscored the importance of convergence, noting that bringing public and private finance together through mechanisms such as the Green Credit Programme and compensatory afforestation funds represents a Whole-of-Government and Whole-of-Society approach. He emphasized that finance must be continuous, verifiable and connected to local communities, noting that India's experience demonstrates what committed domestic resources can achieve but stressed this cannot substitute for additional, adequate and predictable international finance for restoration and drought resilience.
India committed to sharing its experience, safeguards, institutional arrangements, lessons learned and areas requiring course correction, with the ultimate measure of innovative finance being whether it reaches the land, ecosystems and communities that need it most and delivers lasting restoration and resilience.