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HomeEnvironment‘Reimagine’ conservation – Study proposes preserving biodiversity alongside human aspirations

‘Reimagine’ conservation – Study proposes preserving biodiversity alongside human aspirations

In a paper published in Nature Sustainability, the researchers said the approach will succeed only if ‘beneficiaries of ecological restoration & those impacted are addressed in policies.

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New Delhi: To tackle the ever-intensifying biodiversity crisis, researchers in India have proposed a novel mode of preservation that simultaneously advocates for local communities and biodiversity, terming it ‘landscape scale conservation’.

In an article titledPrioritizing India’s landscapes for biodiversity, ecosystem services and human well-being,’ published on 6 February in the peer-reviewed scientific journal Nature Sustainability, experts have called for the “reimagining” of conservation by managing the dual needs of biodiversity conservation and human aspirations, while suggesting that areas which provide this duality need to be identified.

In the past, biodiversity experts had sounded an alarm that species were dying off at 1,000 times the pace than they were before the arrival of humans on Earth.

The team assessed biomes – spaces which are classified in accordance to the species that inhabit them – across the country, locating sites that fulfilled a certain criteria of needs.

Using a “spatial prioritisation approach” to identify the sites, they choose places which ‘represented key and rare natural habitats’, provided ‘crucial ecosystem services’ such as carbon and water, and contained ‘diversity of threatened species’.

The research demarcated 338 districts that play a key role in maintaining India’s biodiversity and ecosystem services.

According to the study, 169 are were classified as ‘high priority’ districts, where natural habitats, biodiversity and ecosystem services were currently at optimal levels and spanned a large spatial extent land area.

“The core tenets of these approaches hinge fundamentally on effective and equitable models of governance that are fully cognizant of the complexities of socio-ecological systems, which are only beginning to be recognised in environmental and conservation policy,” says the study.

Essentially, they said that pre-existing frameworks needed to be built upon while smoothing out certain issues.

“Locations of high conservation priority where mega-infrastructure projects are being planned or implemented, locations where attempts to conserve the land–– shared by people and wildlife –– may be viewed as exclusionary and therefore opposed by local residents,” Arjun Srivastha, the lead author of the paper, told ThePrint.

The experts also underscored that locations where communities are granted Community Forest Rights, and where by declaring areas declared as Critical Wildlife Habitats under the Forest Rights Act must be taken advantage of. The authors said these provisions were currently underused.

“Our paper discusses the current legal provisions extensively.  States and policy makers can adopt to implement our recommendations, while also emphatically underscoring the need for multi-stakeholder engagement that takes local communities into confidence while implementing such interventions,” he said.

This approach, which seeks to link biodiversity with the “services” that an ecosystem provides will only succeed “if the beneficiaries of ecological restoration, and those who may be otherwise impacted (typically the marginalised sections of society), are addressed in policies and implementation,” states the study.

We propose starting with “aspirational districts,” which are upwardly mobile, Uma Ramakrishnan, one of the authors of the study, told ThePrint.

 “As plans for development are in the works for the aspirational districts, so should considerations of biodiversity, unique habitats, and the varied threats these important landscapes face. How can development plans in these districts, for example, explicitly consider landscape scale conservation?” she added.

Need to act on India’s biodiversity agreements

At the United Nations’ biodiversity conference COP15 last year, 196 countries agreed to a global mission to halt and reverse biodiversity loss by 2030. This consists of a number of wide-ranging targets – 30 per cent of Earth’s land and seas are to be put under protection and human-induced species extinctions are to be stopped. Subsidies deemed harmful to nature have been slashed by $500 billion annually.

“We hope that areas identified as priority can be discussed in the context of international targets agreed to by India for restoration and biodiversity conservation as part of the Bonn challenge and the recent COP respectively,” said Ramakrishnan.

The Bonn Challenge is a global effort to bring restore 150 million hectares of deforested and degraded land into restoration by 2020 and 350 million hectares by 2030. India reiterated its commitment by becoming the first country to release a progress report in 2018.

“This might take more discussion, but should be considered,” she added.

Not only was India one of the signatories of the biodiversity agreement at last year’s COP15 in Canada, it is also a member of the High Ambition Coalition (HAC), a group of over 113 countries that aims to bring 30 per cent of the world’s geographical area under conservation by 2030.

“These are commitments India has already made. We are just providing guidance on where to prioritise, so that people and biodiversity benefit in the long term,” said Ramakrishnan.

She also highlighted the need to use the spatial distribution technique in other arenas, including non timber forest product collection, pollination services by wild insects/animals.


Also read: Why did methane levels shoot up in Covid yr? Warm weather, and less pollution


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