Protecting the guardians

We’ve often heard of many plantation schemes where new trees are planted and taken care of, but the old ones are often left neglected who’ve been serving our nature and us for several generations. One such peculiar initiative was recently taken by the district magistrate of East Champaran. Under this scheme named “Save Our Guardian Project” thousands of older trees were identified which are said to be around 50 to 100 years old, including some which are even around 400 years old. Several groups are formed namely “Sanrakshak Mandal” who’ve been assigned the job of taking care of the trees and protecting them. On the occasion of Raksha Bandhan Rakhi was tied to each one of them taking the oath of protecting these trees by all means. An app named Paryavaran Prahari is also being designed to record the location and other basic information regarding each of these valuable assets. Protecting older trees holds a very crucial importance in protecting our ecosystem because of several reasons;

• Older trees are the primary storehouses of carbon which keep a huge amount of carbon sequestrated in them.
• Old trees owing to their dense crown provide shelter to many types of birds and other creatures, thus enriching our biodiversity.
• These trees have very extensive root systems which hold on to the soil and help in controlling erosion, which becomes really crucial for flood prone places like Bihar.
• Apart from these, old trees are also aesthetically most appealing and do also hold historical importance in some cases.

Above all such initiatives and schemes will help change people’s mindset about trees, creating more awareness about the ecosystem services that they provide and their total value including the intangible assets and not just the timber value.