National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan
Introduction
The National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan is now ready for printing. This is after a three rounds of seeking comments at various levels and undergoing subsequent revisions over the last one-year. The draft national plan was made available to several hundred institutions and agencies from within and outside government, and was been put onto websites for public access. A summary of the plan was also translated into several Indian languages for widespread distribution, to generate discussion and comments from the public.
The national plan recommends a series of bold measures to ensure that the country’s ecological security is assured, and that the livelihoods of the millions of people dependent on biological resources are also secured. These measures call for a major re-orientation of the process of economic development and of governance of natural resources, such that the health of the environment especially critical ecosystems and wildlife habitats, and livelihoods of biomass dependant communities, become central to all planning, and such local communities become central to decision making.
The NBSAP process itself has followed a “bottom-up” principle, by involving people from various sectors to make their own action plans. A Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) project, the process has been coordinated by the NGO Kalpavriksh with a 15-member Technical and Policy Core Group, and administered by Biotech Consortium India Ltd (BCIL). It is funded by the GEF through the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). This multi-sectoral coordination arrangement is an unusual departure from government-led national processes held so far.
In another departure from usual practice, the national plan has been drafted only at the end of the process. Prior to this, over 70 local, state, inter-state, and thematic action plans have been prepared by communities, academics, government officials, students, and others. This has been done through widespread grassroots consultation and awareness involving public hearings, biodiversity festivals, workshops and seminars, foot marches and boat rallies, questionnaires, outreach through mass and folk media, and so on. Well over 50,000 people have participated in an influential way. The National Action Plan is prepared by the Technical and Policy Core Group and it is built partly on these 70 odd plans.
Strategies and actions
The national plan draft stresses the following strategies and actions:
* Preparing a national land and water use plan, through a widespread participatory process, which would map the areas of the country that are essential for ecological and livelihood security and off-limits to commercial developmental purposes which disrupt and destroy essential ecological processes;
* Creating or strengthening of decentralised institutions of governance, with the basic planning and decision-making unit being at the level of the village or hamlet, and other local, state, and national level structures emanating from this basic unit;
* Re-orientating development-related policies, laws, and schemes, to ensure that biodiversity and people’s livelihoods are secured;
* Ecoregional planning’ on the basis of ecological boundaries, such as river valleys, forest blocks, coasts, mountain ranges, and so on, including ‘ecoregions’ cutting across state and international boundaries;
* Integrating biodiversity concerns through inter-sectoral and inter-departmental coordination at local, district, state, and national levels;
* Expanding and strengthening the network of conservation sites for wild animals and plants, including protected areas (national parks and sanctuaries), community conserved areas (like sacred sites, community forests, village tanks), Biosphere Reserves, Ecologically Sensitive Areas, Heritage Sites, Medicinal Plant Conservation Areas, coral reefs and mangroves, and others;
* Conserving areas (agrobiodiversity protected areas) that are critical for indigenous crop and livestock diversity, and promoting practices that would help to conserve this diversity amongst farmers, pastoralists, fisherfolk, and others;
* Respecting, protecting, and building on traditional knowledge of biodiversity, including through community-led development of biodiversity knowledge registers, and innovative legal or other means of traditional knowledge rights that do not fall into the trap of privatised intellectual property rights like patents;
* Strengthening and promoting community-level crop gene banks and seed banks;
* Promoting indigenous, nutritionally-superior food crops such as coarse millets in the Public Distribution System, mid-day meal schemes, Food for Work programme, and other such public sector programmes;
* Regulating tourism in natural land and waterscapes, and facilitating genuine ecotourism through strictly enforced ecological and cultural guidelines, and by enhancing the capacity of local communities to manage it;
* Tackling a range of threats to biodiversity, including quiet but widespread ones like alien (exotic) invasive species, and climate change;
* Facilitating sustainable, bio-resource based livelihoods (including micro-enterprises), of fisherfolk, adivasis and other forest-dwelling communities, small peasants, artisans, and pastoralists, with special attention to disprivileged sections like women, nomads, and the landless;
* Building capacity of all sections of society to handle various issues of biodiversity, especially of decision-makers, urban citizens, and others who are particularly alienated from ecological and livelihood concerns;
* Strengthening the Environmental Impact Assessment procedure, by integrating biodiversity in all its aspects (especially agrobiodiversity which is currently missing), and increasing the role of citizens;
* Estimating the full economic and social values of biodiversity, especially its role in ensuring water and climatic stability, soil productivity, and people’s livelihoods;
* Re-orienting state and national budgets, to squarely integrate the true and full value of biodiversity and the environmental services performed by natural land and waterscapes, and redirect funding for rural and urban development into conservation and sustainable use;
* Increasing the funding for biodiversity measures, including through innovative financial mechanisms such as an industrial tax on industries that use biological resources, an urban tax on rich citizens that benefit from ‘free’ services provided by natural ecosystems;
* Promoting traditional and new technologies that reduce the negative impact of current human activities and use alternative materials that are ecologically sustainable, such as organic farming, non-conventional energy, environmentally friendly architecture, and other processes in infrastructure, industrial, and agricultural sectors;
* Facilitating and developing ecologically conscious consumer groups and markets, such as for organic food, alternatives to plastics, and other eco-friendly produce;
* The Genetically Engineered or Modified Organisms are to be evaluated taking into account long term ecological and socio-economic studies by independent agencies ensuring the participation of key stakeholders in decision making and disclosure of information generated in evaluating the biosafety.
* Pro-actively advocating the integration of biodiversity and livelihood issues specific to India, at all international forums, including environmental treaties, and economic agreements such as under WTO.
The plan also lays out an implementation and monitoring mechanism for the above measures, linking this to the proposed Biological Diversity Bill. This includes:
* Relevant authorities or boards at local, state, and national levels;
* A National Biodiversity Network that builds on the network created in the NBSAP process;
* Specially designated officers to handle biodiversity matters in each Union Ministry.
Overall, the national action plan advocates that the focus of all planning and decision-making in India should be achieving the twin objectives of ecological security (including conservation of ecosystems and species) and livelihood security (especially of the most under-privileged sections of society).
Contacts
* D.D. Verma, Jt. Secretary, Ministry of Environment and Forests, Paryavaran Bhawan, CGO Complex, Lodi Estate, New Delhi 110003; Tel: 011-24361613;
* Ashish Kothari, Kalpavriksh, Aptmt. 5 Shree Datta Krupa, 908 Deccan Gymkhana, Pune 411004; Tel/fax: 020-25654239; Email: ashish@nda.vsnl.net.in
* Kanchi Kohli, Kalpavriksh, J20 Jangpura Extension, New Delhi 110014; Tel/Fax: 011-24316717; Email: nbsapna@vsnl.net, kanchik@vsnl.com
* Vibha Ahuja, BCIL, Anuvrat Bhawan 5th Floor, 210 Deen Dayal Upadhyay Marg, New Delhi 110002; Tel: 011-23219064; Fax: 011-23219063; Email: biotech@nda.vsnl.net.in, vibhaahuja@biotech.co.in
The National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan is now ready for printing. This is after a three rounds of seeking comments at various levels and undergoing subsequent revisions over the last one-year. The draft national plan was made available to several hundred institutions and agencies from within and outside government, and was been put onto websites for public access. A summary of the plan was also translated into several Indian languages for widespread distribution, to generate discussion and comments from the public.
The national plan recommends a series of bold measures to ensure that the country’s ecological security is assured, and that the livelihoods of the millions of people dependent on biological resources are also secured. These measures call for a major re-orientation of the process of economic development and of governance of natural resources, such that the health of the environment especially critical ecosystems and wildlife habitats, and livelihoods of biomass dependant communities, become central to all planning, and such local communities become central to decision making.
The NBSAP process itself has followed a “bottom-up” principle, by involving people from various sectors to make their own action plans. A Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) project, the process has been coordinated by the NGO Kalpavriksh with a 15-member Technical and Policy Core Group, and administered by Biotech Consortium India Ltd (BCIL). It is funded by the GEF through the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). This multi-sectoral coordination arrangement is an unusual departure from government-led national processes held so far.
In another departure from usual practice, the national plan has been drafted only at the end of the process. Prior to this, over 70 local, state, inter-state, and thematic action plans have been prepared by communities, academics, government officials, students, and others. This has been done through widespread grassroots consultation and awareness involving public hearings, biodiversity festivals, workshops and seminars, foot marches and boat rallies, questionnaires, outreach through mass and folk media, and so on. Well over 50,000 people have participated in an influential way. The National Action Plan is prepared by the Technical and Policy Core Group and it is built partly on these 70 odd plans.
Strategies and actions
The national plan draft stresses the following strategies and actions:
* Preparing a national land and water use plan, through a widespread participatory process, which would map the areas of the country that are essential for ecological and livelihood security and off-limits to commercial developmental purposes which disrupt and destroy essential ecological processes;
* Creating or strengthening of decentralised institutions of governance, with the basic planning and decision-making unit being at the level of the village or hamlet, and other local, state, and national level structures emanating from this basic unit;
* Re-orientating development-related policies, laws, and schemes, to ensure that biodiversity and people’s livelihoods are secured;
* Ecoregional planning’ on the basis of ecological boundaries, such as river valleys, forest blocks, coasts, mountain ranges, and so on, including ‘ecoregions’ cutting across state and international boundaries;
* Integrating biodiversity concerns through inter-sectoral and inter-departmental coordination at local, district, state, and national levels;
* Expanding and strengthening the network of conservation sites for wild animals and plants, including protected areas (national parks and sanctuaries), community conserved areas (like sacred sites, community forests, village tanks), Biosphere Reserves, Ecologically Sensitive Areas, Heritage Sites, Medicinal Plant Conservation Areas, coral reefs and mangroves, and others;
* Conserving areas (agrobiodiversity protected areas) that are critical for indigenous crop and livestock diversity, and promoting practices that would help to conserve this diversity amongst farmers, pastoralists, fisherfolk, and others;
* Respecting, protecting, and building on traditional knowledge of biodiversity, including through community-led development of biodiversity knowledge registers, and innovative legal or other means of traditional knowledge rights that do not fall into the trap of privatised intellectual property rights like patents;
* Strengthening and promoting community-level crop gene banks and seed banks;
* Promoting indigenous, nutritionally-superior food crops such as coarse millets in the Public Distribution System, mid-day meal schemes, Food for Work programme, and other such public sector programmes;
* Regulating tourism in natural land and waterscapes, and facilitating genuine ecotourism through strictly enforced ecological and cultural guidelines, and by enhancing the capacity of local communities to manage it;
* Tackling a range of threats to biodiversity, including quiet but widespread ones like alien (exotic) invasive species, and climate change;
* Facilitating sustainable, bio-resource based livelihoods (including micro-enterprises), of fisherfolk, adivasis and other forest-dwelling communities, small peasants, artisans, and pastoralists, with special attention to disprivileged sections like women, nomads, and the landless;
* Building capacity of all sections of society to handle various issues of biodiversity, especially of decision-makers, urban citizens, and others who are particularly alienated from ecological and livelihood concerns;
* Strengthening the Environmental Impact Assessment procedure, by integrating biodiversity in all its aspects (especially agrobiodiversity which is currently missing), and increasing the role of citizens;
* Estimating the full economic and social values of biodiversity, especially its role in ensuring water and climatic stability, soil productivity, and people’s livelihoods;
* Re-orienting state and national budgets, to squarely integrate the true and full value of biodiversity and the environmental services performed by natural land and waterscapes, and redirect funding for rural and urban development into conservation and sustainable use;
* Increasing the funding for biodiversity measures, including through innovative financial mechanisms such as an industrial tax on industries that use biological resources, an urban tax on rich citizens that benefit from ‘free’ services provided by natural ecosystems;
* Promoting traditional and new technologies that reduce the negative impact of current human activities and use alternative materials that are ecologically sustainable, such as organic farming, non-conventional energy, environmentally friendly architecture, and other processes in infrastructure, industrial, and agricultural sectors;
* Facilitating and developing ecologically conscious consumer groups and markets, such as for organic food, alternatives to plastics, and other eco-friendly produce;
* The Genetically Engineered or Modified Organisms are to be evaluated taking into account long term ecological and socio-economic studies by independent agencies ensuring the participation of key stakeholders in decision making and disclosure of information generated in evaluating the biosafety.
* Pro-actively advocating the integration of biodiversity and livelihood issues specific to India, at all international forums, including environmental treaties, and economic agreements such as under WTO.
The plan also lays out an implementation and monitoring mechanism for the above measures, linking this to the proposed Biological Diversity Bill. This includes:
* Relevant authorities or boards at local, state, and national levels;
* A National Biodiversity Network that builds on the network created in the NBSAP process;
* Specially designated officers to handle biodiversity matters in each Union Ministry.
Overall, the national action plan advocates that the focus of all planning and decision-making in India should be achieving the twin objectives of ecological security (including conservation of ecosystems and species) and livelihood security (especially of the most under-privileged sections of society).
Contacts
* D.D. Verma, Jt. Secretary, Ministry of Environment and Forests, Paryavaran Bhawan, CGO Complex, Lodi Estate, New Delhi 110003; Tel: 011-24361613;
* Ashish Kothari, Kalpavriksh, Aptmt. 5 Shree Datta Krupa, 908 Deccan Gymkhana, Pune 411004; Tel/fax: 020-25654239; Email: ashish@nda.vsnl.net.in
* Kanchi Kohli, Kalpavriksh, J20 Jangpura Extension, New Delhi 110014; Tel/Fax: 011-24316717; Email: nbsapna@vsnl.net, kanchik@vsnl.com
* Vibha Ahuja, BCIL, Anuvrat Bhawan 5th Floor, 210 Deen Dayal Upadhyay Marg, New Delhi 110002; Tel: 011-23219064; Fax: 011-23219063; Email: biotech@nda.vsnl.net.in, vibhaahuja@biotech.co.in
