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What's the article about?
- It analyses the current biodiversity practises in India and suggests some innovative methods.
Relevance:
- GS3: Conservation, Environmental Pollution and Degradation, Environmental Impact Assessment;
- Essay;
- Prelims
Context:
- We recently observed International Biodiversity Day, which falls on May 22. Climate change is causing an existential dilemma in the world today.
- While we are continually creating new technology to address the problem of climate change, we frequently underestimate the importance of natural biodiversity in addressing this issue.
- Thus, the writer of the article examines how conserving biodiversity might be used to help address the issue of climate change.
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International Day for Biological Diversity – 22 May
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Analysis:
- Importance of biodiversity in dealing with the issue of climate change:
- Mitigation of climate change is just one benefit that we get when we conserve our natural biodiversity.
- It also fulfils our basic needs for food, shelter, medicines, mental health, recreation, and spiritual enrichment.
- It is biodiversity that will restore our degraded lands and polluted rivers and oceans and sustain our agriculture in the face of climate change.
- It is biodiversity that will form the basis of a new sustainable green economy. And it is biodiversity that will inspire our children to opt for a more humane, just, and hopeful future, which accords primacy to the living world.
- Declining state of the natural biodiversity across the globe:
- Despite the importance of biodiversity that ultimately sustains all human endeavours, we have been poor stewards for caring and nurturing life on earth.
- Globally as well as in India, we have failed to adequately conserve and manage our precious, irreplaceable natural heritage.
- Biodiversity is declining worldwide, and our last remaining, largely isolated ecosystems are degrading due to changes happening around them, such as loss of species, climate stressors, and continuous human pressures.
- Suggestions:
- Wider interpretation:
- Currently, the main custodian of the natural world is the Indian Forest Service. But the term “Forest” to describe our immense and unique natural heritage is flawed.
- India’s biodiversity is not only on land but also in water bodies, rivers, deltas, and oceans. A rich array of our ecosystems is in the form of grasslands, savannas, alpine pastures, deserts, and other types of ecological communities.
- Even in the 20th century, people had started to talk about living organisms and the interconnectedness manifested as ecosystems and ecosystem services in multifunctional landscapes dominated by humans.
- In the 21st century, the basic terms “forests” and “wildlife” have limited meaning or usefulness.
- Role of local communities:
- We must think of multifunctional landscapes, where aspirations, beliefs, traditional knowledge, and direct participation of local communities are central to the notion of conserving and sustaining life on earth.
- In 2006, policymakers in India enacted the Forest Rights Act, that called for an increase in the stake of indigenous groups in ownership as well as management of biodiversity.
- However, the Act largely remains on paper, yet to be implemented on the ground.
- Seventeen years later, it is time to even move beyond the Act’s steps to fundamentally alter the way we manage our biodiversity.
- Mainstreaming biodiversity: National Mission on Biodiversity and Human Wellbeing (proposed)
- India’s leading conservation biologists, working under the umbrella of the Biodiversity Collaborative based in Bengaluru, conceptualised the idea and developed a road map for the Mission approved in principle by the Prime Minister’s Science, Technology, and Innovation Council.
- The Mission will enable our country to meet critical challenges in climate change, natural and regenerative agriculture, and ecosystem and public health using biodiversity and ecosystem services — usually referred to as nature-based solutions.
- The ultimate goal is to enhance and conserve biodiversity to foster human well-being; more specifically, to meet the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals related to poverty alleviation, nutrition and health, and environmental protection, and support an era of new green economy.
- Wider interpretation:
Way Forward:
- In many ways, biodiversity is us and we are biodiversity. Thus, civil society must play a critical role in sustaining our biodiversity. A paradigm shift in the care of biodiversity, long overdue, must begin now, flowing from this International Biodiversity Day.
