Vision 2047: Natural habitats teeming with wildlife to cover half of India: K Ullas Karanth

K. Ullas Karanth, emeritus director, Centre for Wildlife Studies (CWS). (Photo credit: ©Ramnath Chandrashekar)

A leading tiger expert and conservation zoologist, K. Ullas Karanth founded the Centre for Wildlife Studies (CWS) in 1984 and has an extensive body of work in wildlife conservation. In an interview with Moneycontrol, he shared how he sees his vision unfold by 2047. Edited excerpts:

What is your vision for India's wildlife conservation? 

We must recognize that scientific wildlife conservation includes not only recovery of threatened species and habitats, but often sustainable harvest of some species (such as in fisheries) as well as elimination of harmful species or individual animals.

Also, the term wildlife is being applied too broadly in India, to include plants and animals that can broadly be defined as biodiversity. The definition of wildlife which includes only ‘terrestrial, free-ranging, vertebrates’ is more useful as it will exclude feral domesticated species, captive wildlife species which are not really wildlife.

What are the various aspects that need to be addressed as part of this vision, as part of the country's policy on environment and wildlife conservation?

One of the major problems, accentuated greatly after a World Bank model of ‘throwing money at conservation problems’, was adopted by India during the past quarter century. Gross misapplication of massive funds to poorly identified priorities followed by substandard, non-scientific implementation of conservation projects has now infiltrated deeply into wildlife management across India. Although massive public funds are being frittered away, gains have been few and abuses many.  This approach needs a reversal first and foremost if anything is to change at all.

From a perspective of achieving effective wildlife conservation, we need to demarcate and preserve far more extensive habitats for endangered wildlife species than we are doing now, protecting a mere 4 percent of our land in protected areas with a focus primarily on species such as tigers and elephants. I would say at least 10-15 percent of India’s land must be set aside for this purpose using many other charismatic species as flagships, with snow leopards, river dolphins, otters, bustards, and wolves being some potential examples. Protection and management of such well-defined wildlife habitat must apply the best available wildlife, honestly assess both successes and failures, and adaptively change course as needed.

Human-wildlife conflicts, which often accompany successful species recoveries, must be squarely addressed from a pragmatic perspective of mitigation of human misery rather than catering to urban animal rights/welfare concerns that irrationally prioritizes the welfare of individual problem animals, instead of focusing on saving populations of that species. On the environmental front, economic, land use and developmental policies that complement the above conservation agenda overall. They must be implemented through fine-tuning of practices which can buffer their impacts on wildlife. In fact, land-use practices that help expand such protected natural habitats beyond the present abysmally low fraction such as eco-tourism must be incentivized.

Can you list what specific steps are required to achieve Wildlife Conservation over the next 24 years?

Define what is wildlife clearly as suggested above and taper down the massive conservation bureaucracy that now rules the sector.

Train and create a strong human resource base of competent wildlife researchers, wildlife managers, technicians and law enforcement specialists and administrative personnel in both public and private sectors. This is what we are already doing with engineers, doctors, and other professions.  The current centralized, bureaucratic monopoly of a poorly trained civil service such as the forestry department simply cannot deliver what needs to be done at the scale and with financial efficiency required.

What are your suggestions to mitigate current challenges?

Have a high level, independent, competent, professional review of wildlife conservation, without the bureaucracy and ill-informed judges who often get involved.

What kind of participation is required from the public to make wildlife conservation a reality by 2047?

Ill-informed conservation interventions such as high court cases filed to prevent elimination of man-eating tigers are doing more harm than good for wildlife conservation. Similar is the problem of environmentalist’s enchantment with some forms of ‘green energy’ such as windmills, solar farms and micro-hydel projects that are invading and destroying wide spans of biodiverse habitats in India. Environmentalists don’t seem bothered about issues like massive forest encroachments enabled by the Forest Rights Act of 2006, still unfolding endlessly after 17 years of its original terminal date or about the massive local hunting and overkill of wildlife in the extensive forests in central, eastern, and north-eastern India. Ironically, these empty forests have seen the least ‘development’ compared to regions of India where wildlife is relatively better off. I am worried that environmentalism of this kind is turning into a foe rather than a friend of wildlife conservation. How we balance needs of nature conservation with those of human development and desire for prosperity needs more serious examination.

Development, demographic transition, and economic growth have impacted nature adversely in some cases. But they have also reduced poverty, improved both health and lifespans of people across the country. Hoping to achieve nature conservation by ignoring this popular demand for development is not a realistic future strategy for conservationists.

Anything else you would like to add?

I see two key ideas as useful. The idea of sustainable landscapes proposed by John Robinson in 1993 as opposed to the prevailing paradigm of ‘sustainable use of nature everywhere. He proposed instead carving up tomorrow’s world into a collage of sustainable landscapes, with some part exclusively set aside for threatened wildlife and biodiversity, another part set aside exclusively for industrial and urban landscapes, and a third fraction where some kinds of biodiversity and human land use (forestry, agriculture) can co-exist.

‘Ecomodernists’ plead that our aim should be not to exploit nature more intensely and unsustainably, but to ‘decouple’ ‘human development pressures from nature by relying on more rather than less technology. However, all this requires dismantling of a top-down bureaucracy that now has stranglehold on conservation in India, although its grip on the industrial and development sectors seems to be slackening after liberalization.