The increasing expansion of cropland is major driver of global carbon emissions and biodiversity loss. However, predicting plausible future global distributions of croplands remains challenging.

The continuous rise in the global demand for palm oil has resulted in large-scale expansion of industrial oil palm plantations - largely at the expense of primary and secondary forests. The potentially negative environmental impacts of these conversions have given rise to closer scrutiny.

This document, titled Closing the Enforcement Gap: Groundtruthing of Environmental Violations in Sarguja, Chhattisgarh,is the second in the series of community led groundtruthing exercises carried out by the Centre for Policy Research (CPR)-Namati Environmental Justice Program

The study assessed the biodiversity impact of the project supported by UNDP and the Government of Madhya Pradesh to support local communities in rehabilitating degraded forest, generating sustainable livelihoods and protecting the areas rich ecosystem.