NEW DELHI: During a South Asian Consultation Meeting, Bhupender Yadav, Minister of Environment, Forests, and Climate Change, Government of India, argued that tribal and other local communities that cultivate or engage in other activities for a living should be exempted from the Biological Diversity Act. In a hybrid format, the two-day South Asian Consultation Meeting on the “Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework” was held on Thursday, January 6. He claimed that this exemption will strike a balance between local community development and biodiversity conservation.
The Biological Diversity Act will be enacted in order to place a greater emphasis on the needs of the local community. It also intends to support biodiversity research in order to make required policy reforms to ensure more access and benefit sharing (ABS). “We build to promote economic development, conservation, and connection,” Yadav stated, adding that “conservation is mainstreamed in all sectors of economic development under the ideology of ‘Development without Destruction’.”
According to Yadav, there is a need to incentivise investment for long-term use by enacting relevant legislation to raise the ABS fund, which may be utilised for biodiversity conservation and community development. He went on to say that with a population of over 1.97 billion people and a wide range of biological diversity, south Asia has significant developmental problems and roadblocks. These are exacerbated by low socioeconomic level and the presence of populations that are heavily reliant on natural resources. Representatives from Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Bhutan, the Maldives, and Nepal attended the meeting.