COP 15: India’s Future Challenges and Opportunities in Biodiversity Conservation

India has instituted strong legislation to ensure that we do not lose much of our forests, ecosystems and wildlife.

Dinosaur at COP15 urges more climate action from global leaders.

(photo:undp.org)

India has had a very good record in biodiversity conservation in spite of heavy odds and development challenges and we can be proud of what we have achieved over many decades since Independence thanks to both government, civil society and its citizens. Conservation and wildlife protection are enshrined into our Constitution.

We instituted strong legislation and regulatory mechanisms that have ensured we did not lose much of forests and ecosystems and prevented the extinction of many species through focused and timely actions.

We have also given up projects such as the Silent valley dam and the Sethusamudaram project on ecological and cultural grounds or stopped or regulated night traffic on highways passing through some protected areas. These have been achieved by central and state governments ruled by parties with diverse ideological persuasions.

India Needs Biodiversity Friendly Management to Reach '30 per cent Goal'

India houses the second largest human population on the planet, while less than 5 per cent of the country’s land area is effectively protected for conservation.

In India, less than 5 per cent of the land area is effectively protected for conservation, while the rest is impacted or used by the second largest human population on the plane.

So as per COP15 deliberations if we have to achieve a target of 30 per cent of land and water under a biodiversity friendly management, we need a judicious mix of land-sharing and land-sparing approaches, and co-production and co-management of ecosystem services in diverse social-ecological systems.

We must prioritize spatial extents of land and water parcels that, in the face of anthropogenic and development pressures, can safeguard conservation landscapes and waterscapes across India’s diverse biogeographic zones and contribute to linked ecological and water security under a changing climate.

Overlaying district boundaries, a group of researchers from multiple institutions (Srivathsa et al 2022) have found that 338 districts play a key role in maintaining India’s biodiversity and ecosystem services of these, 169 are ‘high priority’ districts, where the management focus needs to be on retention as much of the existing habitats, ecosystem services and biodiversity as they are in reasonably good shape.

However human wildlife conflicts need attention as conservation success and changes in land-use have escalated these.

The next 169 are ‘potential conservation priority’ districts, where the management focus, besides retention of important sites, should also aim for proactive rewilding and ecological restoration efforts linked to national goals like the 26 million ha that the Prime Minister has cited and create job opportunities linked to these national goals.

Management in NITI Aspirational Districts Must Focus On Biodiversity

India also has districts relatively poor in human development indices called aspirational districts by the Niti Aayog.

It seems prudent that areas where the NITI aspirational districts overlap with ‘high priority conservation’ districts, the management focus needs to be on retention of habitats, ecosystem services and biodiversity through both, state-driven and community and civil society participatory approaches.

This will however require deprioritizing or redesigning mega-infrastructure projects that have a big and irreversible impact on biodiversity and ecosystem services.

We have seen that even projects that are called “green” because they generate renewable energy (wind, solar and small hydel) are not truly “green” unless their ecological impacts are addressed through mitigation and avoidance in critical sites where highly endangered species are found.

In the Niti aspirational districts promoting sustainable models of natural resource stewardship besides conventional conservation approaches such as protected areas need to be experimented with and scaled up based on emerging best practices and policies.

Here, targeted actions are essential to mitigate negative impacts of infrastructure development through economically incentivized instruments for biodiversity friendly land-use that also sustain ecosystem services besides conservation reserves.

The planning of new infrastructure and expansion of existing ones especially linear barriers such as highways and canals have posed several challenges for ecological connectivity besides leading to escalation in road kills of wildlife attempting to cross these that are alarming.

Redesigning these with sufficient mitigation measures and realignment in some other cases needs to be hard-wired into the planning of these.

Aquatic Ecologists Fear Large-Scale Transformation of Rivers

Conservation of fresh water aquatic systems however pose very different set of challenges.

The recently released WWF Living Planet Report 2022 has shown that there has been an 84 per cent decrease in aquatic vertebrates since 1970 and fresh-water biodiversity and the ecosystems (rivers, wetlands, and estuaries) in which they live are the most threatened biome globally and certainly in India.

To reverse the declining trends and truly restore our aquatic biodiversity the way we use and manage water through dams and barrages will have to change and we need to revisit plans for major dams in key river basins especially the north-east.

We will require low to moderate reductions in direct use of river water in sectors such as agriculture and industry. On water quality there have been some improvements in the Ganga basin, but much remains to be done across the country for the restoration of our polluted rivers.

However, in recent years we have seen recovery of the endangered gharial in several sites across the country, including breeding success in the Mahanadi after several decades.

Researchers tell us that this can be attributed largely to reduced conflict with fishers and fisheries due to diverse factors. They also report increase in dry season flows as another positive development.

However, the latter is also largely driven by trends in precipitation, artefacts of leakages and seepages from water infrastructure and their impacts on river hydrology rather than improved ecological flow management by the authorities.

This has benefited the Gangetic River dolphin as well. To sustain these conservation triumphs in the coming decades will require a lot of work.

But what river ecologists and conservationists fear most are the large-scale transformation of our rivers due to inter-linking of rivers as well as their conversion into navigation channels through dredging, channelization and increased mechanised boat traffic and escalation of underwater noise.

The impact all this will have on river health, aquatic biodiversity, fishers and fisheries and human health and well-being is a knowledge and data gap.

Mitigation measures and avoidance are both to be considered going forward.

Achieving the 30 per cent conservation goal for our rivers may be completely defeated if we do not rethink existing paradigms of river and flood-plain development projects and learn to co- exist with the natural and dynamic features of our complex river ecosystems.

Green Development Is the Key to Achieving 30 per cent Goal

In terms of a goal of 30 per cent of land and water under biodiversity friendly coverage, we can only achieve this by going beyond conventional protected area approaches (land sparing) and increase our conservation coverage through ecological restoration and evidence-based strategies for sustainable multiple use (land sharing) of forests, wetlands, rivers, grasslands, coastal and marine ecosystems, urban green and blue spaces areas and agro-ecosystems. 

This would ensure synergies between biodiversity conservation, water security and resilience under climate change as well enhancing our options to adapt to a warming world. 

How India progresses on its ambitious conservation and restoration goals and redesigns will be watched keenly by many other countries in the Global South. Our ability to redesign existing projects or avoid the most destructive ones besides investing in truly green development, livelihoods and jobs will be key to this success.

(Jagdish Krishnaswamy is Dean of the School of Environment and Sustainability and Leads Long-Term Urban Ecological Observatory at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements)

(This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)