S. Gopikrishna Warrier: You’re listening to Everything Environment by Mongabay-India. In 1992, when I moved to Chennai from Delhi, the M S Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF) was one of the institutions that I visited first. Agriculture scientist Dr. M S Swaminathan, whose name was recently announced for a posthumous Bharat Ratna, had returned to Chennai after his international assignments. He established the Foundation to strengthen research and discussions in areas that were close to his heart. He hosted multiple international and national meetings at his foundation. These meetings gave me a wonderful opportunity to be a wallflower on one of the sides of the octagonal conference room and listen to experts from different parts of the world, and also from India. I soaked in like a sponge.

One of the series of meetings that was held in the late 1990s was for drafting the Biodiversity Legislation.

After signing and ratifying the Convention on Biological Diversity, India was one of the earliest countries that moved towards developing a national legislation. Multiple public discussions were organised. A committee was set up with Swaminathan as Chair. Many of these meetings were held at the Foundation (MSSRF). These public discussions on the biodiversity legislation were happening in a period when, politically, the executive was weak, and in relation, the legislature and judiciary were strong.

Welcome to our show Environomy. I am S. Gopikrishna Warrier, Managing Editor, Mongabay-India. Through this series of podcasts, I will take you through the journey of how environment and economics got interlocked after the economic reforms of 1991. This is a journey for which I had a ringside ticket as a journalist reporting and writing on the environment for the past three decades.

In the first three episodes, we looked at how the Indian middle class got a distinct economic and political voice after the economic reforms, how this redefined Indian environmentalism, and how this affected the relationship between the executive, the legislature and the judiciary. In the fourth and the fifth episodes, we examined how the reforms impacted the ecological health of mountains and rivers in the country and the agricultural sector.

In this sixth and final episode, we will explore how India dealt with issues related to biodiversity and climate change, since the economic reforms. Since in the recent years the national government has taken a strong position towards dealing with climate change, this episode will also try to connect the past with the present and the future.

The years 1991 to 1994 were very important for Indian environmental history. Four cornerstone events happened during these years, the combined impact of which were more than the sum of the parts.

The first was the initiation of the economic reforms in 1991, with its thrust on liberalisation, privatisation and globalisation.

The second was India’s active participation in the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, more famously known as the Rio Summit in 1992. It resulted in two conventions — the Convention on Biological Diversity and the Climate Change Convention.

The third event was the Indian parliament passing the 73rd and the 74th amendments to the constitution in 1992. Through these amendments, states in India were necessitated to pass legislations that made devolution of power to the people, possible. A three-tier governance structure starting from the gram sabha in villages, and the municipal ward level in urban centres, emerged over the 1990s in all parts of the country.

The fourth development was India becoming a part of the World Trade Organization (WTO) as it came to existence in 1994. By signing the umbrella WTO agreement, India got a most favoured nation status in its trading relationship with all countries in the world. It also brought the country into a framework of multiple agreements, such as to do with intellectual property, agriculture, etc. These four developments had long shadows across the next three decades, sometimes combining at at other times conflicting in their impact.

Even though India became part of the Convention on Biological Diversity, and the climate change convention in 1992, the country’s position internationally and domestically, were different with reference to these conventions. From the very beginning of the international negotiations on climate change, India was very vocal about the equity issue. India had argued that the climate change problem was mainly due to the heavy greenhouse gas emissions of the developed countries, both in the present and the past.

A country such as India, which has come into the development curve later, requires a certain emission space for economic development. Despite this vociferous position externally, within the country, public-facing policy action started only in June 2008, when Prime Minister Manmohan Singh constituted the Prime Minister’s Council on Climate Change. This led to the launch of the eight national missions and the start of the process for the development of national, as well as, state climate change action plans. In the past decade, there have been concerted policy action, domestically and appropriate engagement in the international negotiations.

On biodiversity, India was an early mover domestically, though it is not known to have been a resounding voice internationally. A committee to develop the biodiversity legislation was in place by the mid-1990s. After multiple consultations, the Biodiversity Act was enacted in 2002. This Act brought into national law, the objectives of the Convention on Biological Diversity. These were: 1) The conservation of biological diversity of the country, along with the associated traditional knowledge 2) Promoting sustainable use of biodiversity and 3) Ensuring equitable sharing of benefits obtained from the use of the biodiversity and traditional knowledge.

But more important, the Convention on Biological Diversity had created a paradigm shift in the ownership of biological diversity. Moving away from a period when biological diversity was considered a global commons, the convention turned it into national property. Successive national governments established and strengthened the biodiversity conservation infrastructure after the Act came into effect. In addition to the National Biodiversity Authority in Chennai, there are 28 state biodiversity boards, and more than 260,000 biodiversity management committees attached to rural and urban panchayats. It is here that the development of the Panchayati Raj structure at the district block and village level in villages and at the district town and ward level in towns, blended into the Biodiversity Act.

Even while the Biodiversity Act was still under preparation in the 1990s, citizen groups in many villages and small towns had started efforts to document the diversity of plant and animal life that was available in their neighbourhoods. They call these documents the People’s Biodiversity Registers or PBRs. The Biodiversity Act later institutionalised PBRs by mandating the biodiversity management committees to develop such registers in their villages and municipal wards. Why did citizen groups in different parts of the country start documenting the biodiversity of the neighbourhoods in the 1990s?

The answer to this question links biodiversity to the new laws and rules that emerged after the World Trade Organization agreement of 1994 and the public controversies regarding turmeric and neem. The news about companies from the Western countries trying to get patents on the humble Indian turmeric and neem was causing serious concerns in and around 1995. ‘How can anybody even think of patenting our haldi for its medicinal properties, when every Indian household has been using it in their cooking for generations?’ they questioned. These discussions came into the forefront with India joining both the Convention on Biological Diversity and the World Trade Organization agreement with its demands to amend India’s laws on patents and other intellectual property.

I remember meeting environmentalist Ashish Kothari in early 1996 and reporting a story about the traditional knowledge of the Onge tribal community in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands for using a plant extract to cure malaria. Kothari was angry that there were efforts to patent-protect this knowledge, even though it was by the Indian Council of Medical Research. He wanted formal acceptance that the knowledge belongs to the Onges and some kind of community right to be designed to share the economic benefits from its use with the community.

The concept of People’s Biodiversity Registers in every Panchayat linked the principles of biodiversity conservation, the Patents Act, and the importance of devolved power to the people through the Panchayats Act. The same three principles were used when India developed the legislation to give seed companies patent protection, even while maintaining the farmers right over the seeds they had conserved and developed. The Protection of Plant Varieties and Farmers Rights Act of 2001 was developed after a series of public discussions, as with the Biodiversity Act.

India’s richness in biodiversity is also its vulnerability to climate change. With its southern tip close to the equator and the northern latitudes stretching into the temperate zone, India straddles multiple temperature profiles. Altitude also adds its dimension from the sea level to the highest ridges in the world. Within these boundaries, India packs multiple ecosystems. To start with cold deserts, warm deserts, alpine meadows, riverine plains, deltas, grasslands, tropical forests, mangroves, etc. Almost all landscapes seen globally are represented in the Indian landmass. Myriad species of plants and animals inhabit these diverse landscapes. Among the 36 global biodiversity hotspots four are represented in India. The four global biodiversity hotspots in India are 1) The Himalayas. This includes the entire Himalayan range 2) Indo-Burma. This includes the entire northeastern India, excluding Assam 3) Sundaland. This includes parts of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands and 4) The Western Ghats. Starting from Dangs in Gujarat, all the way close to Kanniyakumari in peninsular India. This mountain chain is a treasure trove of biodiversity.

The IUCN, in its country profile for India, notes that though the country’s landmass covers only 2.4% of the world’s land area, it packs nearly 8% of all recorded species. This includes 45,000 species of plants and 91,000 species of animals. Conservation International, the organisation that promoted the concept of biodiversity hotspots, states that to be defined as a ‘hotspot,’ the location needs to have at least 1,500 plants that are seen only in that location and should be an area facing an ecological threat.

As an aside, I met Norman Myers, the Oxford-based academic, who is credited with first defining biodiversity hotspots at one of the many international meetings hosted at the M S Swaminathan Research Foundation in the 1990s. Biodiversity hotspots have a large number of plant and animal species that are seen only in that location, also known as endemic species, that are facing threats. But these threats are not limited only to the hotspot areas.

In the year 2018, the Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change (MoEFCC), published a book assimilating research understanding of leading experts on how biodiversity and climate change are interlinked in India. The report notes that while biological diversity provides ecological stability and ecosystem services in perpetuity, climate change sits on top of a long list of threats that India’s biodiversity faces.

Research findings after the 2004 Asian tsunami showed that coastal villages on India’s East Coast that had mangroves or other vegetation between human habitation and the sea, suffered minimal or less devastation compared to the exposed villages. But these mangrove patches are vulnerable to increased environmental and sea water temperature, sea level rise and reduced freshwater flow in rivers. Coral reefs, on the other hand, bleach and die faster with global warming. The importance of large biodiverse forest tracts transcend into regional and global feedback loops. If water flow from the forested rivers of the Western Ghats can give economic and livelihood security to farmers in the Cauvery, delta and Mandya, the Himalayan rivers do so across much of South Asia. And as India turns increasingly urban in the coming decades, vegetation can help in reducing the heat island effect in cities and towns. More green may mean less requirements for energy-guzzling air conditioners that add to the climate change loop.

In the macro picture, climate change threatens the very lifeline of the Indian economy — the seasonal monsoons. These rain-bearing winds that annually traverse from the Indian Ocean, and the Arabian Sea had been bringing rains to the Indian subcontinent, with a seasonal regularity. A changing climate has been breaking this regularity in the recent decades. Even more recently, research has found that the temperature of water in the Arabian Sea has gone above the threshold from which cyclones form. More cyclones in the Arabian Sea could mean more extreme weather events on land.

Even though India’s economy is no longer driven by agricultural incomes, even today, the annual spending year is considered to begin with Diwali festivities after the first major harvest.

All this said and done, biodiversity conservation as well as climate change mitigation and adaptation, requires concerted political, economic and social action. It requires a continuing public and policy support and action. For climate change, public and policy discussions started in the recent years, and are likely to gain strength in the coming years due to India’s commitments to increase renewable energy production and reach net-zero targets by 2070.

If the 1990s was the decade for public discussions on biodiversity, the last decade has been one for climate change. Frequent floods, droughts, heat waves, snowlessness have all made climate change real for everybody. There has been a desire to do something about dealing with climate change. This is where the desire to transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy, fits in. With the Indian government officially announcing the country’s nationally determined contribution (NDC) for mitigating climate change in October 2015, it has become a national goal to help with the energy transition, and the net-zero process.

The energy transition process fulfils the aspirations on growth, development, investment and technology development. It also helps the politically and economically powerful middle class feel satisfied that they have contributed to the greening process in the country. The renewable energy projections are made by taking today’s energy consumption figures as the basis and projecting it into the future.

In this paradigm, the economic value of a natural resource is only computed from its utilitarian point of view. The same logic that was used historically for other development projects are being used for renewable energy projects. The project proponents of a utility scale solar energy park, use the same logic that dam builders or thermal power plant promoters had used before them. They measure the benefits in terms of financial gains that the additional megawatts will generate. What is missed out in the discussions is the economic value of conservation. “If the forests of the wetlands were to be conserved instead of the project, what would be the economic returns in perpetuity, from the resource?” This question is never asked nor discussed. This question, ironically, can become more important for a renewable energy project, since the land required to generate one megawatt of solar energy, is five times that of the land required to generate the same from a thermal power plant.

Internationally famous environmental economist Sir Partha Dasgupta explained this in his interview with Mongabay-India in December 2023. He said that the economics of climate change abatement is built on the classical economics of growth, that countries across the world have been following since the second World War. The component of climate change is merely an add on with the belief that if one element, say fossil fuels, is replaced by another, say renewable energy, then the global growth trajectory can continue endlessly.

Sir Partha also mentioned that, though the discipline of environmental economics has developed over the decades, it has not effectively found its way into policymaking. Environmental economists across the world and in India, have assessed with scientific rigour, the economic value of conserving various biodiverse tracts and associated ecosystem services.

The four cornerstones of the early 1990s are still relevant in the middle of the third decade of the 21st century. No climate change abatement policy can be effective in the mid to long-term, if conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity is not built into the equation. And for this process, to be socially sustainable, there has to be equitable sharing of the economic benefits with those who conserve the biological diversity and associated traditional knowledge of its use.

The three-tier Panchayati Raj institutions that the 73rd and the 74th amendments to the constitution created are the best channels for developing both decentralised climate action, and also benefit sharing mechanisms for biodiversity use.

Dealing with the provisions of the World Trade Organization agreement is tricky ground. This requires ensuring that trade related pressures do not override environmental or social equity related considerations. In September 1998, one of the international meetings at the M S Swaminathan Research Foundation was on forestry and sustainable development. The report of the World Commission on forests and sustainable development was released at this meeting. The report had concluded that the main threat to world’s forests was due to missing markets that did not take into account the value of the environmental and ecological services, which forests provide, to maintain a stable landscape and atmosphere. Instead, forests are valued for the timber they produce. A quarter century later, this truth still remains.

This episode was written and produced by me, S. Gopikrishna Warrier. Production Editor: Kartik Chandramouli. Audio Editor: Tejas Dayanand Sagar.