Strengthening ecosystem resilience of Northeast

India’s updated National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan (NBSAP) has great significance for the Northeast region, a biodiversity hotspot. The NBSAP outlines national biodiversity targets that focus on reducing threats to biodiversity, ensuring sustainable use of resources, and enhancing tools for implementation. As infrastructure development has been given a strong push in the region, the projects in the pipeline need to be aligned with the NBSAP targets, and retrofitting solutions for projects under construction are necessary for conservation of its rich biodiversity. The NBSAP is aligned with the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, which emphasises that urgent policy action is required globally, regionally, and nationally to achieve sustainable development to check biodiversity loss for recovery of all ecosystems. The framework has set four key goals, which include the maintenance of genetic diversity within populations of wild and domesticated species and safeguarding their adaptive potential; biodiversity is sustainably used, and its contributions to people are maintained, enhanced, and restored; ensuring protection of traditional knowledge associated with genetic resources and sharing those fairly and equitably with indigenous peoples and local communities; and closing the biodiversity finance gap. Indigenous people and local communities of the region have traditional knowledge of managing biodiversity through sustainable use. Increasing climate change impact has made subsistence farming practice of the indigenous communities that produces little or no surplus unsustainable for growing populations. The introduction of modern farming through the expansion of areas under agriculture and the cultivation of hybrid species among these communities to boost production and produce surplus put pressure on their natural resources and gave rise to a plethora of problems, including water availability and soil health deterioration. Absence of a strong market linkage, on the other hand, turns the surplus produce non-remunerative, precipitating their financial woes. Demand for better connectivity and transport for market linkage has led to the government undertaking infrastructure projects in the ecologically fragile northeast region. Balancing the NBSAP targets and clamour for development is not an easy task. The policy underlines the importance of community-driven conservation efforts that focus on restoration of degraded ecosystems, protection of wetlands, forests, etc. Individual and community initiatives of ecosystem restoration, such as creating manmade forests on degraded forest land and reviving natural streams in the region, need stronger financial and policy support from the government to encourage replication. Indigenous communities of the region traditionally live in co-existence with nature, but fragmentation of natural ecosystems due to infrastructure projects such as construction and expansion of highways, laying of railway track, buildings for educational campuses, hospitals, and other healthcare facilities, etc., outpaces the community initiatives that take place at a much slower pace due to a dearth of adequate resources. Adequate funding for the community-driven initiatives can bring back the balance and mitigate the losses due to ecosystem fragmentation to a great extent. The communities face mobilising support from private stakeholders such as corporations or business establishments that are keener on technological solutions that will bring them a return on investment in such initiatives of indigenous communities for ecosystem restoration. The government funding to the communities, therefore, is the only hope for meaningful application of traditional knowledge of managing biodiversity in an ecologically sensitive region like Northeast, for which infrastructure development is high on the government agenda to bridge the gap between the region and the rest of the country. Rising intensity of man-animal conflict and severity in natural disasters like landslides and erosion due to rampant felling of trees have already pressed the alarm bell for urgent measures to check the alarming biodiversity loss in the region. Solutions applied in silos to these problems cannot be sustainable. The worldview of traditional communities, which prioritises communities over individuals, underpins the holistic understanding of the problems and application of solutions that they have evolved through close interactions with nature for ages. While application of some of their solutions may not be feasible because of the enormous scale of the problems that transcend geographies of different indigenous communities, the principle of a holistic approach can be incorporated into scientific and evidence-based modern approaches for sustainable use of natural resources. Sand mining, for instance, is crucial for infrastructure projects in the region. Rampant and mechanised sand mining, on the other hand, have led to degradation of river ecology, affecting the livelihoods of fisher folks and adversely affecting agriculture on the river catchments. Failure to restore the degraded ecology of these rivers will lead to a severe water crisis and make agriculture unsustainable for current and future generations. If agricultural practice becomes unsustainable, then huge public expenditure made for the construction of roads, bridges, and railway lines for providing market linkage for trading of surplus produce will turn out to be an unfruitful expenditure. The most important challenge is to adopt traditional knowledge of sustainable use of natural resources of indigenous communities of the Northeast region for evolving scientific solutions that can strengthen their ecosystem resilience.