How will India achieve the new global goals for nature?
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Loading... - Balendra Kumar
- 10 Feb 2023
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From expanding conservation areas to eliminating subsidies that harm nature, implementing the outcomes from the latest global biodiversity summit COP15 is complex for India and South Asia, say experts.
In December 2022, the world’s governments agreed on a set of actions to address the rapid disappearance of wild plants and animals everywhere. For India, turning these goals into reality will require focusing on habitat connectivity, neglected ecosystems and financial support from developed countries – while respecting the rights of local communities to benefit from local wildlife – experts tell The Third Pole.
At the 15th meeting of the parties to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity held in December 2022 in Montreal, Canada, known as CBD COP15, 196 countries agreed upon the ‘Kunming-Montreal Global biodiversity framework’ (GBF).
This framework – which is supposed to serve as a guide for countries to arrest and reverse biodiversity loss until 2030 – comprises four broad goals and 23 targets, relating to restoring ecosystems and preventing species extinction; ensuring people can benefit from sustainable use of wild species; the equitable sharing of the benefits of genetic resources; and securing adequate resources to implement the framework.
Most prominent among these is a target to conserve 30 per cent of the world’s land and oceans by 2030 – widely referred to as the ‘30×30’ target.
Can India achieve 30×30?
“India can comfortably achieve the target of 30×30 by 2030,” India’s environment minister Bhupender Yadav recently told the Hindustan Times, adding that almost 27 per cent of the country’s geographical area is already subject to some kind of conservation measure.
This figure includes formal protected areas like sanctuaries and national parks, which represent a little over 5 per cent of India’s land area, as well as other areas with tree and forest cover, including scrublands, reserve forests and unclassed forests. According to government statistics, forest and tree cover represents 24.62 per cent of India’s total geographical area.
But a possible cause for concern is the fact that plantations, including monocultures which harbour very little biodiversity, have been classified as “forest cover”, and their inclusion may be artificially inflating the figure of land under conservation measures. Read More…
