At sea over marine conservation
The Hindu
OUT OF DEPTH: Terrestrial policies, which have so far shaped our conservation landscape, cannot help protect the marine habitat.
India took the lead in highlighting endangered sea sites as one of
the five top-level themes at the Hyderabad CBD. It is odd therefore,
that the country does not have any comprehensive law that deals with
this important subject
What does 50 million U.S. dollars get you? The eleventh
Conference of Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD)
has just concluded in Hyderabad this October. Prime Minister Manmohan
Singh has made the “Hyderabad Pledge” of $50 million for biodiversity
conservation, and enhancing “human and technical capacity” for
conservation. For the next two years, India is president of the CBD and
is expected, both normatively and administratively, to take a lead in
seeing through decisions taken at the CBD. Most significantly, India now
has a serious chance at reimagining its conservation policies.
Many firsts for COP 11
There
are several firsts at this CBD. This was the first conference of
parties for the implementation of the time-bound Aichi targets, set to
root out biodiversity loss. These targets, decided at the last CBD
conference of parties in Nagoya, relate to planning, ecosystem services,
invasive species, food security and climate change among others. They
are a serious departure from the sort of myopic, single
department-centred approach that conservation has had in our country.
The 20 Aichi targets set out to establish that biodiversity conservation
has to do with nearly every aspect of our life, and subsequent
well-being. Crucially, the Aichi targets are wholly dependent on
national action plans made by parties as per their national
circumstances.
Several decisions have been made at
the CBD which set the tone for domestic action plans. I would like to
emphasise some of the decisions most relevant for the Indian context: on
marine and coastal biodiversity, invasive alien species and protected
areas. Crucially, these decisions have to be looked at through the time
frame provided for the Aichi Targets — from this year to 2020, which is
also two years into the United Nations Decade of Biodiversity. Equally,
while this is the closest biodiversity targets have ever got to a
deadline-oriented framework, this entire framework also runs the risk of
never getting implemented, being wholly contingent on domestic action.
Existing policies
“I
really don’t know what’s down there,” a forest department official
remarked once, referring to the rich coral reefs of Gujarat’s Marine
National Park. I have encountered other officials who believe that coral
reefs are inanimate rock, rather than the sensitive, connected, and
alive polyps they really are. But the concern of the official who
doesn’t really know what’s “down there” is a valid one and should not be
discarded. India has almost 8,000 kilometres of coastline, including
its islands. India is also the country that took the lead in declaring
marine conservation as one of the five themes for the high-level segment
for this CBD meeting. It was decided in Hyderabad that marine areas
which are ecologically and biologically sensitive will begin to get
identified.
Is this a turning point? For India, it
certainly can be. We have accepted voluntary guidelines for keeping
biodiversity in perspective while conducting Environment Impact
Assessments related to coastal and marine projects; it was India that
mooted an “open and evolving” process at the CBD to begin identifying
marine areas of significance through robust, scientific processes.
But
the real question to ask is the one posed by the forest official: do
our policy implementers know what is “down there,” and what will they
do, since they do know? Is our forest department, historically set up to
manage forests, curtail grazing, make plantations and fell timber,
equipped to deal with marine conservation? The answer, clearly, is a no.
While we have available science at our disposal for marine
conservation, it is not an applied science for our forest department,
who have been made the custodians of protecting all manner of wildlife.
And that leads us to an even more significant question: are our present
conservation policies capable of dealing with marine conservation? What
we have in our kitty today is the Wildlife Protection Act, Tree
Preservation Acts (at State level) and Environment Protection Act, none
of which deal in any comprehensive way with marine conservation. Coral
reefs are often referred to as the rainforests of the sea, and sea grass
beds are no less life-giving than terrestrial grasslands, which form a
primary food base for many species. But it is clear that a “tree” of the
sea, or a grassland of a sea, cannot be protected by terrestrial
policies, which have so far shaped our conservation policy landscape.
Just
one example is that of dugongs, large marine mammals which feed on sea
grass meadows. Nicknamed “sea-cows,” they are rapidly disappearing from
their ranges in Gujarat and the Andamans. The sea “cow” nickname is
testimony to how we familiarise ourselves with new concepts through
terms we know already: here, that of a cow. But the sea-cow, for all the
familiarity its name evokes, is fast disappearing, prey to poaching on
land and threats in the sea.
What we need today are
separate laws for marine conservation. At the cusp of finding new marine
Ecologically and Biologically Significant Areas (EBSAs) for India and
implementing targets for marine conservation, what will truly benefit
marine conservation is taking marine conservation out of the box it
presently is in: protection accorded to just familiar groups of marine
species, and protection through marine protected areas, legally imagined
as analogous to terrestrial protected areas.
Alien species and protected areas
On
the question of protected areas (PA), the new text makes an important
point: it calls for “other effective area-based conservation measures.”
This marks a departure from the heavily guarded and enforced PAs which
dot the country and coastline, and, in a majority of cases, have
alienated traditional dwellers in and around PAs. “Other effective
systems” can mean biodiversity heritage areas, community reserves and
important bird areas, which should call for a management regime approach
(seasonal or otherwise), rather than strict protection. Invasive alien
species, like the omnipresent Lantana, have caused considerable economic
and ecological damage, sweeping over natural habitats, as well as
city-forests. But India has never felt the need to have a policy for
alien species, despite the risk they pose to the mainland and the
biodiversity hot spot of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. The new text
on invasive alien species calls on countries to address threats from
these species, check pathways and spread. This is especially important
for a country as massive and megadiverse as ours: where even native
species can be “alien” — the House Crow, for example, is a serious
threat to the biodiversity of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.
Post-CBD,
the money is where the mouth is; now comes the all-important question
of creating responsible domestic policy and action plans for it. As a
host country and as CBD president, this is a chance for India to ensure
CBD decisions and recommendations don’t remain paper tigers. Or just
paper.
(Neha Sinha is with the Bombay Natural History Society. The views expressed are personal. E-mail: n.sinha@bnhs.org)
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