Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli surprised everyone with his address to government officials and environmental enthusiasts in late December 2024. He questioned the necessity of the country’s nearly 46 percent forest cover, even suggesting that reducing it to 30 percent would suffice. The rest of the land could then be used to grow food.

In the United States, the Trump administration ordered an expansion of logging activities across the 113 million hectares of protected national forests and other public land. He asserted that increased cutting of trees would help curb wildfires, protect communities and benefit the logging industry through reduced reliance on imported timber. In Brazil, a 60 percent increase in deforestation of the Amazon forests occurred during former President Jair Bolsonaro’s tenure (2019–2022). The move to promote agriculture and cattle farming made scientists fear an impending tipping point past which there could be planetary consequences. Brazil is also cutting thousands of trees to build roads for the CoP30 climate summit, the irony of which seems to be lost on most.

Nepal’s Parliament took a similar stance regarding the proposed tree cutting in Nijgarh, the proffered site for constructing an airport. Even after the Supreme Court decided to halt the original plans to cut 2.4 million trees and directed the relevant authorities to look for alternative sites for the airport, the parliamentary International Relations Committee instructed the government to expedite the work by eliminating the legal obstacles. These examples illustrate how politicians, irrespective of their ideology, have started to value quick economic gains over sustained conservation of the natural environment.

Missing public debate

The environmental movement of over half a century, particularly following the global environment conference of 1972—which helped formulate and establish the cornerstone policies and institutions aimed at conserving forests and the environment—seems to be faltering now. The forest lands have been targets of short-term financial gains over long-term environmental richness, the latter becoming more crucial to fighting the climate crisis.

In a democratic society, the PM’s suggestion of only 30 percent forest cover should have sparked rigorous public debate from experts and practitioners dedicated to conservation efforts, including raising awareness of the need to protect forests and designing and implementing programmes to that end. Alternatively, experts should have debated the PM’s logic and whether the actions and policies of the last half a century were misguided in any way. In either case, it shouldn’t have been dismissed as gibberish.

Nepal has achieved nearly 46 percent of forest cover through the relentless collective action of communities and governments over several decades. Nonetheless, we also shouldn’t hesitate to give the PM the benefit of the doubt that perhaps reasons related to our broader national interests, which had evaded environmentalists, prompted the somewhat unexpected thought of reducing our overall forest cover.

Now, with the US’s proposed plans to hand over public land—over seven times the size of Nepal—to the logging industry, the idea of maintaining forests in only 30 percent of the area and using the cleared land to grow food may not sound as absurd as it once did. After all, the suggestion came from the chief executive. Failing to argue against this will only encourage those who scout for opportunities to exploit natural resources for momentary financial benefits rather than the long-term health of the natural environment. Therefore, it demands serious and nonpartisan deliberation.

Policy question

While the rift between those advocating for the wide-scale protection of forests for the planet’s health and those in power attempting to enact policies and directives for short-lived gains at the cost of our forests has become more blatant, the climate crisis continues to unfold rapidly. The successes of our past efforts to recover the lost greenery and increase forest cover for carbon sequestration to meet net-zero commitments seem shallow and verbose when the rising, imminent threats of unsettled monsoonal patterns, loss of biodiversity, dwindling water sources and, above all, loss of crop productivity fail to mobilise politicians. They appear solely focused on securing the next elections.

Changing distributional patterns of monsoon rain and increasingly drier winters have affected the primary economic sectors of agriculture, livestock, tourism and energy like never before. This year, winter precipitation was above average in the western Himalayas, causing such havoc as avalanches in Uttarakhand, India, while it was worryingly below average in the eastern Himalayas, east of the Karnali basin in Nepal. We may not be able to rectify these changes as they are consequences of global phenomena. We don’t know to what extent Nepal’s winters and its established water cycle will continue to be disrupted. The least we can and must do is minimise any interference that disrupts this cycle further. Unfortunately, our preoccupation with short-term gains is doing just the opposite.

Consequently, well-intended public policies are bound to remain limited to paperwork in such situations. Most scholars agree that policies such as environmental and, by extension, climate policies, need to wrestle with complex systems in which diverse societal interests interact selectively. When policies fail to address these diverse interests or convince them to alter their preferences, they aren’t just overlooked but also ignored in favour of short-term financial interests.

Take the recent issuance of the land ordinance to ease the distribution of land from government-owned public land including, among others, protected areas and reserves to the landless and squatters. The ordinance couldn’t muster the required support in Parliament, sparking fear that the provisions might run the risk of being misused to appropriate land from environmentally sensitive areas for commercial uses. This fear emanated from cases where the government had colluded with business houses to lease public land for commercial purposes without considering the environmental consequences.

Sadly, this proclivity, leading to an intensification of climate impacts, which, in many cases, have already exceeded our capacity to handle, are surfacing at a critical juncture when we all face existential threats.

Nudging the policymakers

Even when they appear convinced of the evolving climate threats and are supportive of environmental conservation efforts, policymakers have different views when it comes to using the commons for passing financial gain. As environment/climate policies have to compete for attention in crowded policy space, environment advocates must keep reminding policymakers that these fleeting monetary interests have landed us into this predicament—an environment incessantly exasperated by climate change. This, in turn, will hurt all of us, regardless of our power or position.