The numbers tell a grim story.

Kashmir has lost 15% of its forest cover since 1990. Temperatures are rising twice as fast as the global average. Floods that once came every few decades now strike with alarming regularity.

Yet every year, crores of rupees arrive to fight these very problems. But the climate money seems to evaporate between government files and the vanishing forests.

Take the Compensatory Afforestation Fund, meant to replace every tree cut for development.

A recent audit found Jammu and Kashmir had spent only 38% of its allocated funds on actual afforestation. The rest disappeared into a maze of administrative expenses, questionable purchases and vaguely defined “capacity building” exercises.

In one telling example, officials in Shopian district reported planting thousands of saplings in areas that satellite images showed remained bare.

The pattern repeats with disaster preparedness funds.

After the devastating 2014 floods, international donors poured money into flood mitigation projects. Yet when auditors followed the money trail, they found nearly a quarter of these funds had been diverted to unrelated road construction projects.

Training programs for disaster response existed only on paper, with no record of ever being conducted.

Nowhere is this disconnect more visible than along the Mughal Road, where thousands of mature pine trees were felled for a transmission line between 2016-2018.........

© Kashmir Observer