An ecosystem to save, or squander
Instead of opening a debate on the Gadgil panel’s report on the Western Ghats, the government has chosen to sideline and replace it with another by an alternate group
This is a challenging time in India’s development history where a number
of tenets of environmental governance are being questioned by the
imperative of growth. Environmental governance in India is under
assault, and is thus in need of both fresh thinking, and a new focus,
based on outcome and results.
The Western Ghats are no ordinary ecosystem. They constitute the water
tower of peninsular India, providing water to 245 million people and
draining a large part of the land surface of India. They are also a
treasure trove of biodiversity. The Convention on Biological Diversity
confers sovereign rights over these elements of biodiversity for which
we are a country of origin. India can play an important role in research
relating to such biodiversity elements and claim a share in the
commercial profits flowing out of their use. The elements of value not
only include medicinal plants and cultivated species of plants and their
wild relatives, but seemingly worthless creations such as spider
cobwebs, which turn out to be sources of a new kind of silk stronger
than steel. Notably enough, such elements of value are by no means
confined to natural forests, but occur everywhere across the Western
Ghats, underscoring the need to maintain connectivity amongst
biodiversity rich habitats.
Hostility
Today, however, it is estimated that only seven per cent of the Ghats’
primary vegetation survives and there are many threatened species, of
which 51 are critically endangered species. It was in this context of
threats and in response to demands by people of the Western Ghats, that
the Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel (WGEEP) was set up in March 2010
by the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) to assess the state of
the Ghats and suggest ways for their “conservation, protection and
rejuvenation” through a process of consultations with State governments,
industry, and local people. Post submission of the report in August
2011, its “quarantine” until May 2012, and its subsequent release, the
panel presumed that a more detailed public discussion would follow its
translation into regional languages, and then finalised. This did not
happen. Instead, an adversarial environment emerged or was created,
resulting in hostility to the WGEEP report. State governments protested
that development will be affected, without a careful reading of what it
allows, promotes and seeks to protect. They chose to ignore, as did the
MoEF, the tentativeness of the panel’s recommendations, the provisional
nature of zone boundaries and sectoral guidelines, to be used for
informed and inclusive deliberations, a point made repeatedly but which
continues to be misrepresented. However, instead of there being a larger
debate around the WGEEP report, the Ministry chose to appoint a High
Level Working Group (HLWG) whose mandate it was to examine the WGEEP
report “in a holistic and multidisciplinary fashion.”
We would like to comment on three aspects of this examination: (i) the
process followed, (ii) analytical approach adopted, and (iii)
recommendations made.
The process
The stakeholder comments received by the MoEF (1,750 in a population of
50 million in the Working Group States) should have been shared with the
panel. Instead, secrecy followed — inexplicable, given that the WGEEP
was an MoEF appointed panel, not a fly-by-night operator as seen in the
mining regions of the Ghats. The MoEF also summarily rejected the
panel’s plea that any decision in the matter should be made only after
the report is made available to people in regional languages and their
feedback obtained. The HLWG’s examination of the WGEEP report ought
surely to have commenced with a dialogue with the panel. This was not
done, but for a meeting with the chairperson and some of the members,
very late in the game. Instead, the HLWG had a limited consultative
process and finalised the recommendations and submitted its report,
without sharing this with the Gadgil Panel, suggesting that the
intention was not to make the WGEEP recommendations “implementable,” but
really to replace it by an alternative framework.
Analytical approach
The approach adopted for the examination combined a selective review of
development issues in the WGEEP report with its own reasoning that
insufficiently regarded the Western Ghats as an ecosystem from the
perspective of “conservation, protection and rejuvenation.” An ecosystem
such as the Western Ghats comprises both people and the ecology, and
hence WGEEP carried out its mandate using a social-ecological lens. It
is misleading then to suggest that the WGEEP did not have local people
or the state’s development needs in mind in arriving at its
recommendations. What WGEEP did was mainstream into development planning
for the districts of the Western Ghats the more long-term needs of the
people such as water and ecosystem services. With this in mind, it
suggested not just the graded regulation of the more ecologically
harmful activities, but the promotion of more benign, job creating
activities, for example, agro and biomass-based industry, regulated
ecotourism, industries and services that involve dematerialisation,
education hubs, etc. In energy provisioning, it recommended clean
energy, “smart” demand side management campaigns, and more equitable
distribution policies.
Misread
Despite a detailed discussion of the sectoral issues and dilemmas and a
whole chapter dedicated to multi-centred governance for the Ghats that
examined both regulatory and market instruments, the impression has been
created that there was no engagement in our report with social and
development issues. We do agree that there was need for more discussion
on the recommendations, but these were to be discussed and refined after
submission to the MoEF. Many arguments were made for incentivising
environmental improvements through ecosystem payments and fiscal
measures, as were discussions of how the Green India Mission,
Compensatory Afforestation and Management and Planning Authority
(CAMPA), and National Afforestation and Ecodevelopment Board (NAEB)
should aim for genuine and effective transfer of powers and funds to
local institutions for implementing the programmes. Similarly, it was
argued that international mechanisms such as Clean Development Mechanism
(CDM), and (REDD+) or Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest
Degradation (REDD), Forest Conservation, and Enhancement of Carbon
Stocks and Sustainable Management of Forest could be tapped to provide
adequate financial resources for larger scale efforts, for example,
where plantation owners chose to regenerate forests where these
plantations were no longer seen as profitable, as some owners suggested
to us. Instead, it is suggested that WGEEP had recommended that coffee
plantations be restored to forests, creating panic among plantation
owners of Kodagu, when no such reference was made.
It is thus unfortunate that the spirit of the WGEEP report is being
distorted and misread and an impression being created that it was rigid,
disregarded social and development issues, and is thus, not
implementable. The WGEEP approach was to engage with the community in
understanding their concerns, do the scientific assessments, and then
take the science back to the local community, and have the state and
community take the final decisions on both ecologically sensitive areas
and sectoral activities that should be allowed.
The use of more detailed remote sensing data and inclusion of more
social data in the HLWG report is an improvement for arriving at a more
detailed zoning. But only a few parameters are used to arrive at
ecological sensitivity. It is not evident to us if this list of
parameters is sufficient to define the sensitivity of this unique
ecosystem. Nor is it clear that just incentives and current regulations
will result in improved behaviour of agents in harmful activities in the
other (cultural landscape) areas. It was, in fact, in response to the
people in the inhabited areas, where such activities impact people’s
lives, water, health and livelihoods, that we had suggested that there
was need for strong oversight and regulation of such activities. This is
where the pressures are most high as are conflicts.
Recommendations
The HLWG calls for an Ecologically Sensitive Area for just 37 per cent
of the Western Ghats; it drops the layered ecological sensitivity
approach for the rest of it. Mere incentives for greener growth for the
rest of the 63 per cent of the Ghats, we believe, will result in
business as usual. How does that protect the Western Ghats as an
ecosystem? In sum, the HLWG report does not review and refine the WGEEP
report, but provides instead an alternative framework and
recommendations.
In the light of these two reports, we need more thinking on the kind of
environmental governance needed for the Western Ghats around: (i) the
value of the Western Ghats ecosystem and the services it provides (ii)
the consultative processes required to arrive at recommendations, and
(iii) the argument made about “implementability.” To which we ask: for
whom and for what?
(Madhav Gadgil and Ligia Noronha were members of the Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel.)
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