India is home to almost eight percent of worldwide biodiversity on 2.3 percent of the worldwide land region, India contains segments of four of the 36 worldwide biodiversity areas of interest. India's one of a kind and various biological systems, disseminated across many scenes, streams, and seas are financially significant as well. The worth of India's timberlands adapted to expansion was assessed to be 1.78 Trillion Dollars in 2018.

Being a megadiverse country, lodging around 10% of the world's species, it likewise has a rich social legacy returning millennia. A lot of Indian biodiversities are complicatedly connected with the socio-social acts of the land.

The facts confirm that there is a gigantic level of animal categories in India yet we didn't know pretty much every one of them until the "Biodiversity Collaborative", a developing organization of Indian preservation researchers and environmentalists, was granted a seed award by the Principal Scientific Advisor (PSA) in 2019 to foster the program for the National Mission.

What are they doing?

Biodiversity Collaborative is currently implementing a preparatory phase project for the Mission to be hosted by the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, with the National Biodiversity Authority as the nodal institution for managing it. The Mission has two components. Its centrepiece, NISARG Bharat (National Initiative for Sustained Assessment of Resource Governance), will document and map India’s biodiversity, including its rich biocultural diversity, to enable the conservation and sustainable use of biological resources. The second component will consist of six programs, each with field-based projects to realise the identified Sustainable Development Goals. These will not be restricted to protected areas or some specific geographical regions, according to the Collaborative.

Noting that the mission has an expansive mandate, the Collaborative explained, “For example, a specific programme devoted to the enhancement of biodiversity in agro-ecosystems. Another important programme seeks to restore biodiversity in a range of habitats–grasslands, forests, and wetlands, to name a few. Although the mission will have several core programmes, a large number of resources will be dedicated to grants for research and action programmes relevant to biodiversity in any location.” 

Reference: india.mongabay.com

Recognition:

Commenting on the Mission’s framework, environmental geographer Ruth DeFries, who is not associated with the Collaborative, said the well-being of all people in all countries, and India in particular, is tied to biodiversity and wildlife surviving amid high human pressures is a “remarkable achievement.”

“The ability to grow food, filter clean water, and provide other resources depend on healthy, diverse ecosystems. I don’t know of other examples where countries have so explicitly recognised this connection, which is to India’s great credit,” DeFries told Mongabay-India.

What will be our challenges?

While India faces several challenges in the sustainable use of biodiversity, its investments in transdisciplinary biodiversity science are not commensurate with the severity of these challenges. India faces several “pressing” policy and governance challenges, outlined members of the Biodiversity Collaborative.

Public interest is indeed a challenge that I recognise. The collaborative has identified opportunities from the COVID-19 experience on people’s fascination with biodiversity. 

There have been a lot of initiatives like The Aichi Biodiversity Target 1 states that by 2020, at the latest, people are aware of the values of biodiversity and the steps they can take to conserve and use it sustainably.

My statement: 

India currently is hastily moving towards a path that, if executed correctly, can be an example or inspiration to all other countries. We indeed are a developing country. We need to work together for bringing out drastic changes in many other fields but climate change, biodiversity sustainability and environmental protection are a matter of national importance and we can’t ignore that.