Read the following passage and questions, then choose the right answer from options, the answer should be one of A, B, C, D.

<passage>:
The forests bear the carbon What is happening here may resemble a comedy of elemental errors, but it has significance far beyond the mountainous forests of Kumaon, one of two regions in the state of Uttarakhand. Rai is working with a number of other ecologists and field assistants on the pithily titled research project, Long-term Monitoring of Biomass Stocks and Forest Community Structures in Temperate Zone of Western Himalaya. Right now, the forests of Kumaon are used primarily for fodder and fuel. Traditionally, families in the area had as many as 15 or 20 cows of their own. These cows were particularly dependent on the forest leaves for fodder and bedding. The fewer leaves a tree has, the less able it is to photosynthesise properly. Today, there are far fewer cows in the area and so fodder use has come down by a multiple of four or five in the last 10 years. The market has come to Kumaon – once an isolated area – and artificial substitutes for fodder are now available to buy locally, with NGOs providing subsidies for this. But while the pressure on the forest to provide fodder has come down, the need for it to provide fuel has gone up. This is in the Himalayan foothills, after all, and it gets cold in winter. There is little central heating and so a serious amount of wood is needed for fires to heat houses and light stoves. Where extended families once lived together, with grandparents, parents and children all under one roof, now the nuclear family is becoming the norm, meaning that requirement for fuel has gone up. And if the people of Kumaon are to use the forest less, they need compensation, or they will have no fire to warm them through the winter months. Substitutes for wood are available but are unaffordable for most. So the challenge for this project mirrors the challenge faced by climate change scientists and policymakers across the world: how can you reduce fossil fuel emissions and maintain and improve carbon sinks without disrupting or destroying the lives of local people, many of whom will be those most affected by climate change? Last March, US science agency the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) released figures that showed record concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, at over 400 parts per million (ppm). These levels are unprecedented in over a million years and have caused over one degree of warming. The level considered 'safe' – 350 ppm – was exceeded nearly three decades ago. Today's carbon concentrations represent a more than 40 per cent increase on those found in the atmosphere in the middle of the 18th century, before the beginning of the industrial revolution. Forests are an important part of this increase. They are, along with the planet's oceans, one of two major carbon sinks. Deforestation puts carbon into the atmosphere while at the same time removing that sink. "You can say that one quarter of this increase in carbon concentrations since the 18th century has been caused by deforestation," says Corinne Le Quéré, author of the Third, Fourth and Fifth Assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and a professor of climate change science and policy at the University of East Anglia. Kumaon's unique elements appealed to Rai. The area has two main types of oak tree, a number of pines, rhododendrons, cedars and maples. There are leopards, porcupines, wild boars, a variety of snakes and rodents, and 200 species of butterfly. The forests grow down hillsides into valleys and up along plateaus. There are now 40 forest plots in Kumaon, and the hope is that in the next couple of years that total will rise to 100. One night, I join Amogh Rai for dinner at the house of one of his two field assistants, Narendra. This was in the 1990s, when Kumaon was a particularly remote part of the country. It still is, comparatively speaking, but the arrival of mobile phones, satellite technology and the expansion of the road network has changed the area. The population has grown and rich professionals from the city have begun to build second homes in Kumaon, drawn to the area, like the British before them, by the promise of peace and tranquillity in the mountains, by the chance to get away from it all. Narendra remembers that, in these times, when far more people kept cattle, the forest was a place almost everyone used and understood. "We used to go out in a throng and bring trees down to use the leaves for manure, which is also used as a bedding for cattle," he says. "The animals would piss and shit on it and then it was used as manure." Today, keeping cattle has become economically unviable and artificial fertiliser can be bought at the market. As a result, fewer people use and understand the forest. The Chipko movement was a phenomenon in 1970s India, an organised resistance to the destruction of forests across the country. The villagers who formed it were actual tree huggers: the word Chipko means 'embrace'. In one incident, women in the Alaknanda valley, responding to the Indian government's decision to grant a plot of forest land to a sporting goods company, formed a human ring around the trees, preventing the men from cutting them down. In Kumaon, there is a strong history of this kind of resistance to exploitation by powerful forces. As Guha and the political scientist Arun Agrawal have pointed out, the villagers of the region did not take the impositions of the British Raj lying down. The 'empty-belly' environmentalism of India awakened early, a fierce reaction to the iniquitous and destructive development processes foisted on the country by the imperial power. From the late 19th century into the 20th, the Raj introduced legislation that reduced the rights of local people to use their forests. From 1916 to 1921, villagers in Kumaon set hundreds of forest fires in protest against such legislation. They depended on forests for firewood for heating and cooking, manure for fields and fodder for livestock. This demand was seen as running contrary to the needs of the British, who wanted to carve up the forests of Kumaon to create railway sleepers. This kind of practice didn't end with the Raj. "The government department once went on a rampage and planted cypresses all over the place," Amogh Rai says, laughing at the wasteful absurdity of the idea. "They planted them because someone who is a bureaucrat would have gone to England and thought, 'Oh, beautiful trees, let's plonk them up there.' But the cypress doesn't bear fruit, its wood is rotten when it comes to burning, its leaves are spindly so you can't feed it to cattle. All in all, it's a shitty tree." British officials used the excuse that local practices were environmentally destructive to defend the regulation of vast areas of forest. Nearly half the land in Kumaon was taken over by the forest department which, by the beginning of the 20th century, was endeavouring to protect land from fire as well as clamp down on cattle grazing and fodder harvests. In response to the regulations and reclassifications landing on them, villagers broke the rules. Fodder and fuel was extracted, livestock was grazed. British forest officers were fed misinformation like a fire is fed wood. – were created to manage the forests of Kumaon. Villagers could once again use their land the way they saw fit, free from the commercial priorities of the colonial government. This new plan to preserve the forests of the region in the 21st century is also being met with accusations of imperialism. Unlike carbon trading schemes or high profile incentive programmes like REDD and REDD+, the system for compensation envisaged in Kumaon would not be open to foreign tampering or carbon offsetting, though the question of the Japanese money complicates matters.

<question>:
What were the forests of Kumaon used for traditionally?

<options>:
A Small-scale farming of produce such as daikon and tomatoes
B Feed for the livestock that was raised in the area
C Protected religious sites of great cultural importance
D Burning the wood to warm nuclear families in individual houses

<answer>:

B