Biodiversity: Authority, economics and ecology

Do you know that India has a National Biodiversity Authority? I was unaware of its existence until recently. It is an autonomous and statutory body of the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, Government of India. I sought Google's help to learn more and got directed to the National Biodiversity Authority's website. The home page has a dozen images flashing one after the other. I couldn't see a picture of any animal, plant, river, landscape, or marine wonders to my disappointment. What do we see in the images? Only Homo sapiens. You need to dive deep to see the good work done by the agency.

The vanishing bustard of M Krishnan's 'Nature's Spokesman'(1952,2000), the Indian elephants of 'Stracey's Elephant Gold' (1963) and the golden frogs of Elizabeth Kolbert's 'The Sixth Extinction'(2014) are living examples of man's ignorance, greed and dominance over nature's biodiversity. The Asiatic cheetahs of M K Ranjitsinh's 'A Life with Wildlife' (2017) are no more in Indian jungles to tell the pathetic tale of man's brutality.

Have you also wondered if a bulbul, a cuckoo or a tailorbird singing in your surroundings contribute to your life satisfaction? A study covering 26 countries in Europe measured human wellbeing. It concluded that bird species richness was positively associated with life satisfaction across Europe. Joel Methorst and his naturalist colleagues published their findings in Ecological Economics (2021). They claimed that adding 14 bird species around you would enhance your life satisfaction as much as an extra 124 Euros a month. Notable, isn't it? But we always felt it, even if we have never quantified it. Someone needs to whisper this wisdom in political corridors too.

For a long time in written history, man has measured economic resources in terms of GDP. Sir Partha Dasgupta, an Indian-British economist in 'The Economics of Biodiversity: The Dasgupta Review'(2021), has pitched for National Wealth, including natural capital and capital goods and human capital. Sir David Attenborough, who penned the foreword for the review, warns that humans and our livestock constitute 96% of all the mammals and 70% of all the birds alive today are the chickens that we eat. Governments pay people to exploit the biosphere unsustainably. Economics and ecology need to come together to protect biodiversity.

Biodiversity is threatened by the interplay of climate change, expanding agriculture, large scale land-use changes, unsustainable extraction of natural resources and many other elements. Despite the age of 'big data', we lack reliable data that pinpoints factors for biodiversity loss. This leads to the unavoidable compartmentalisation of the world. In a resource-starved situation, experts of each compartment compete with each other. As conservationists fret over methodologies, the political class – often ecologically illiterate – plays around with natural resources.

At a global level, the picture is more disappointing. A group of 168 member states signed United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) to halt the rapid loss of biodiversity three decades ago. The member states kept meeting, setting biodiversity targets and failing to meet the targets. Biodiversity continued to decline.

As we battle the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, the member states will meet again later this year. Interestingly, China will host the Conference of the Parties (CoP 15), the convention's governing body. Which country is better placed than China to be hosting a conference on biodiversity? Invasion of alien species, deforestation, global warming and pollution have left the ecology and biodiversity of China vulnerable. The Aichi targets adopted by the CBD at its Nagoya conference in 2010 had called for the protection of 17% of terrestrial and inland waters and 10% of coastal and marine areas by 2020. The world is lagging by miles.

Diversity of fishes in our wetlands, butterflies in our gardens, birds in our backyards, rice in our fields, turtles in our ponds, spiders in our basement, lives in our subsoil, indigenous trees in the countryside, bamboos on our farms and forests, medicinal plants in our vicinity, frogs and lizards around us and indigenous people with traditional wisdom call for a biodiversity framework beyond protected areas. Do you romanticise protected reserves in remote areas that separate people and forests, or would you fall in love with biodiversity around you, in populated areas that you identify and are a part of?

(The writer is a freelance author and conservationist and can be reached at [e-mail])