The announcement by the United Nations terming 2021-30 as the Decade of Ecosystem Restoration could not have come at a more appropriate time.
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The rapid expansion of global economies over the last 60 years, along with an increase in development-led human pressures, have resulted in over-exploitation and degradation of natural resources at a pace that far exceeds their natural ability to recover.
Increased movement of people and goods has led to a rise in the invasive alien species all around the world, which heavily impact the biodiversity. Degradation has also impaired ecosystem service capability across the board.
There is an urgent need to reverse this trend and assist ecosystems to recover at a rate faster than their degradation. This calls for a shift from the traditional model of endangered species-focused conservation to a new one of ecosystem restoration. This applies to India as well.
We are one of the most biodiverse countries in the world. However, most of our unique ecosystems stand degraded to varying degrees today. Not just forests, many other ecosystems like wetlands, rivers, estuaries, grasslands and deserts, are damaged. Restoring them is a mammoth task, but one that will yield major benefits for our biodiversity and citizens. The question, then, is how we go about it.
Identifying restoration priorities
The first step should be to identify priority areas for restoration. A pre-requisite for this is a reasonably robust inventory of degradation of different ecosystems at a national level. We could then build a restoration strategy around the three top priorities for the country.
This would help direct policy-making, project identification, resourcing and implementation towards these key priorities. Projects that can deliver benefits across more than one priority may receive greater attention.
The first priority should be restoration aimed at enhancement of ecosystem services. A good example would be water security, which requires attention to our catchment areas, freshwater lakes, rivers, etc.
The second restoration priority would be enhancement of biodiversity. Many of our forests have lost much of their native plants due to invasion by alien species. As a result, they are legally protected, but ecologically unprotected. Development pressures like roads, railways and tourism have led to degradation of multiple ecosystems, including coastal and high altitude ones.
The third priority of restoration would be prevention of natural disasters. Although this by itself is an ecosystem service, identifying this as a separate priority is warranted by the scale and breadth of natural disasters that we have been facing in the last two decades.
Landslides in several parts of the country have shown us the damage denuded hills can do. In the absence of healthy mangrove forests, cyclones are leaving a trail of lost life and property even in the hinterland areas. We need to urgently revive our natural disaster prevention mechanisms.
Developing a policy framework
An ecological restoration policy at the national level is needed. The policy has to strike a balance between the needs of climate change, biodiversity conservation and ecosystem integrity.
Research findings indicate that biodiverse ecosystems are far more efficient in sequestering carbon and providing ecosystem services, and this should help us move away from putting excessive focus on tree-planting drives.
The policy also has to include aspects like goal setting, monitoring, leveraging diverse streams of knowledge, public-private partnership, funding, etc. The policy should recognise that the primary responsibility for restoration lies with the State and communities and private sector organisations can at best play an ancillary role.
Building capacity for restoration
Unlike other geographies like North America and Australia, ecological restoration is a relatively new discipline in India and hence our restoration capacity is quite limited. The discipline has grown rapidly around the world in the last 30 years, with well-defined principles and protocols.
Best practices for restoration of many ecosystem types are available. Adapting these to Indian conditions would benefit our restoration initiatives significantly.
Ecological restoration is a specialised discipline with a high focus on sciences dealing with restoration, plants, soil, hydrology, geology, etc. Hence, there is an urgent need to create dedicated graduate and post-graduate courses on ecological restoration as part of our academic curriculum, using courses offered by universities overseas as reference.
Training models also need to be designed for forest departments, who are key stakeholders managing many of our ecosystems. Short-term training programmes for field supervisors will also be essential.
Scaling up
Developing low-cost, replicable restoration models will enable restoring larger areas with same funding. Integrating various restoration projects within a landscape could help derive greater synergies and scale.
Restoration research needs to focus on finding scalable solutions to field challenges. Leading institutions like Indian Institutes of Technology need to focus their environmental engineering studies on ecological restoration.
Accessing funds for grassroots restoration work is currently challenging. Funding agencies, including corporate CSR, need to allocate larger resources for this crucial activity.
Ensuring stakeholder engagement
The success of large scale restoration efforts needs involvement of a wide range of stakeholders including local communities. This can by itself be a driver of livelihoods. Many countries have public-private partnership models for restoration where accredited organisations participate in the process, both on non-profit and for-profit models.
Developing metrics for assessing the economic value of restoration will help generate greater appreciation among the wider public, and the evolution of a greener GDP model.
Accomplishing all of the above may take the initial few years of the decade of restoration. But having these building blocks in place will ensure that our restoration program is targeted and effective. Otherwise, we run the risk of continuing to witness adhoc and dispersed efforts on a small scale.
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Steve Ovett, the famous British middle-distance athlete, won the 800-metres gold medal at the Moscow Olympics of 1980. Just a few days later, he was about to win a 5,000-metres race at London’s Crystal Palace. Known for his burst of acceleration on the home stretch, he had supreme confidence in his ability to out-sprint rivals. With the final 100 metres remaining,
[wptelegram-join-channel link=”https://t.me/s/upsctree” text=”Join @upsctree on Telegram”]Ovett waved to the crowd and raised a hand in triumph. But he had celebrated a bit too early. At the finishing line, Ireland’s John Treacy edged past Ovett. For those few moments, Ovett had lost his sense of reality and ignored the possibility of a negative event.
This analogy works well for the India story and our policy failures , including during the ongoing covid pandemic. While we have never been as well prepared or had significant successes in terms of growth stability as Ovett did in his illustrious running career, we tend to celebrate too early. Indeed, we have done so many times before.
It is as if we’re convinced that India is destined for greater heights, come what may, and so we never run through the finish line. Do we and our policymakers suffer from a collective optimism bias, which, as the Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman once wrote, “may well be the most significant of the cognitive biases”? The optimism bias arises from mistaken beliefs which form expectations that are better than the reality. It makes us underestimate chances of a negative outcome and ignore warnings repeatedly.
The Indian economy had a dream run for five years from 2003-04 to 2007-08, with an average annual growth rate of around 9%. Many believed that India was on its way to clocking consistent double-digit growth and comparisons with China were rife. It was conveniently overlooked that this output expansion had come mainly came from a few sectors: automobiles, telecom and business services.
Indians were made to believe that we could sprint without high-quality education, healthcare, infrastructure or banking sectors, which form the backbone of any stable economy. The plan was to build them as we went along, but then in the euphoria of short-term success, it got lost.
India’s exports of goods grew from $20 billion in 1990-91 to over $310 billion in 2019-20. Looking at these absolute figures it would seem as if India has arrived on the world stage. However, India’s share of global trade has moved up only marginally. Even now, the country accounts for less than 2% of the world’s goods exports.
More importantly, hidden behind this performance was the role played by one sector that should have never made it to India’s list of exports—refined petroleum. The share of refined petroleum exports in India’s goods exports increased from 1.4% in 1996-97 to over 18% in 2011-12.
An import-intensive sector with low labour intensity, exports of refined petroleum zoomed because of the then policy regime of a retail price ceiling on petroleum products in the domestic market. While we have done well in the export of services, our share is still less than 4% of world exports.
India seemed to emerge from the 2008 global financial crisis relatively unscathed. But, a temporary demand push had played a role in the revival—the incomes of many households, both rural and urban, had shot up. Fiscal stimulus to the rural economy and implementation of the Sixth Pay Commission scales had led to the salaries of around 20% of organized-sector employees jumping up. We celebrated, but once again, neither did we resolve the crisis brewing elsewhere in India’s banking sector, nor did we improve our capacity for healthcare or quality education.
Employment saw little economy-wide growth in our boom years. Manufacturing jobs, if anything, shrank. But we continued to celebrate. Youth flocked to low-productivity service-sector jobs, such as those in hotels and restaurants, security and other services. The dependence on such jobs on one hand and high-skilled services on the other was bound to make Indian society more unequal.
And then, there is agriculture, an elephant in the room. If and when farm-sector reforms get implemented, celebrations would once again be premature. The vast majority of India’s farmers have small plots of land, and though these farms are at least as productive as larger ones, net absolute incomes from small plots can only be meagre.
A further rise in farm productivity and consequent increase in supply, if not matched by a demand rise, especially with access to export markets, would result in downward pressure on market prices for farm produce and a further decline in the net incomes of small farmers.
We should learn from what John Treacy did right. He didn’t give up, and pushed for the finish line like it was his only chance at winning. Treacy had years of long-distance practice. The same goes for our economy. A long grind is required to build up its base before we can win and celebrate. And Ovett did not blame anyone for his loss. We play the blame game. Everyone else, right from China and the US to ‘greedy corporates’, seems to be responsible for our failures.
We have lowered absolute poverty levels and had technology-based successes like Aadhaar and digital access to public services. But there are no short cuts to good quality and adequate healthcare and education services. We must remain optimistic but stay firmly away from the optimism bias.
In the end, it is not about how we start, but how we finish. The disastrous second wave of covid and our inability to manage it is a ghastly reminder of this fact.