A European Commission co-funded pilot project, part of the larger Haryana Community Forestry Project (HCFP), is the first small scale afforestation project in the world to get certified by the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM).

The pilot project, with an afforestation area of 370 hectares of sand dune land belonging to 227 farmers in eight villages of Sirsa district, Haryana has been selected for a carbon trading project within the Kyoto Protocol Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

The north Indian state of Haryana is bound by severely eroded Shivalik and Aravalli hill ranges in the north and south. The western part bordering the Rajasthan desert is semi-arid with sand dunes.  In the central plains the soils are affected by salinity, alkalinity and water logging. A significant portion of community land in the entire state is degraded due to population pressure, over-cutting and over-grazing of vegetation. To restore the degraded lands a World Bank funded Social Forestry Project was implemented in 1982-1990. With the experience of this project, and in view of the potential of raising plantations on village common lands, a new project was proposed to the Government of India for international funding.

The European Commission allocated a grant of 23.3 million euros for the implementation of the nine-year long community based Haryana Community Forestry Project (HCFP), with a matching contribution by the Government of Haryana of 6.8 million euros. The main objective of the Haryana project is to improve the natural environment of the state through sustainable management of natural resources and through active participation of the village communities in eleven districts of the state.
 

The overall project reaches out to 337 villages, with a total population of around 700,000—more than 110,000 households. In the course of the project, tree cover on common land has increased from nine percent to 30-34 percent. Stabilisation of shifting sand dunes through tree plantation has substantially reduced the occurrence of dust storms and loss of crop land. The project has also generated 4½ million paid workdays, financed out of the European Commission funds. The labour has been used to raise and maintain project plantations, to construct water harvesting dams and rehabilitate village ponds.