G.L Khajuria
Nearly 1.75 million species of plants, animals and microbes have been documented so far, while around 10 to 15 million of this number are waiting for their turn of documentation after giving scientific names, this enormous diversity is not, however, evenly distributed over the globe and insofar as India is concerned . She has been recognized to be one out of 12 mega diversity areas of the world. The Indian sub-continent is also one of the eight centres of the origin of cultivated plants.
The current inventory of Indian flora and fauna documents 1, 30, 4 taxas including 1700 species of flowering plants as per the report of the Ministry of Environment and Forest (MOEF) Government of India.
The biological resources of the earth are vital to humanity that depends upon them for clean environment, food security, health care and of course social needs, sources of livelihood, trade, industrial growth and economic development and many more of their offshoots. The growing awareness of the implications and consequences of basic facts during the last four-and-half decades have brought the issues related to conservation and sustainable utilization of natural resources to the centre stage paving the way for the biological
diversity.
The legal binding has been signed by 168 countries including India which recognises the sovereign rights of nations over the bio-resources and state the obligations enjoined upon by the contracting parties. In order to further this argument, let us replicate that plants are capable of capturing the energy from the sun through a process of photosynthesis and generating the net primary product (NPP) which serves as the resource for the growth and sustainability of all bio-forms. In general the competition amongst plant species for land allocation and the competition among other life forms for NPP allocations, constitute the core of national evolutionary process. Threat to biological diversity arises when the rate of extinction of species far exceeds the rate of speciation. Risk analysis can also be done in respect of individual species on the basis of several quantitative criteria developed by IUCN for categorization of species as endangered, threatened, rare and venerable and this information is crucial for undertaking appropriate rescue operation, remedial measures as well as to collect germplasm for ex situ conservation.
Since the beginning of agriculture around 10,000 years or so, humans are continuously engaged in converting natural resources (Forest land) into their more selective and productive forms as for example conversion into farmlands, pursuit of developments, real estate, factories and their allied.
All these in unison tantamount to endangerment of biological resources. While the reallocations of resources, as a consequences have already benefited human societies and their associated species ( livestock and their cultivated plants). Consequently this has drastically reduced the resources to other species.
The extent of population explosion together with their live stocks during the last five and half decades, illustrates the vital points. Another equally distributing factor is development in that all societies are adopting strategies for obtaining their needs from a mere handful of species. And increasingly, it is the same small group of species which sustain every society. So it is quite obvious from the forgoing’s that a particular output from natural evolutionary process gets selected by its compatibility to successfully interact within the system through Its role in the eco-system. In other words, the evolution of a particular species is an indicator of its capacity to act by itself and also to interact with other species in the eco-system. Bio-diversity conservation essentially means the conservation of unique characteristic of the output from a rigorous evolutionary process. Every species and its genotype is the unique in its entire spectrum.
To replicate biodiversity is important not for the sake of variety alone but more so because it is the output from evolutionary process around four million years old. Every existing species is in a way, an encapsulated history of the process and represents an entirely unique set of genetic information. It can not be created or syntheses artificially with available tools. Extinction of a species is as thus an inseparable loss.
It is, of course not worthy that living organisms may be treated as renewable since they are capable of reproduction and can be multiplied based on inherited genetic information but the aggregation of genetic differences represented at species level which may best be encapsulated as a non renewable resource.
In a way, bio-diversity exists at the interface between two broad group: renewable and non-renewable resources. It shares the commonality with other ancient non-renewable resources viz fossil fuel, fertile soil and vast aquifers in the sense that it is one time endowment from nature to earth and cannot be replaced on any time scale relevant to humanity.
At the same time, it is also distinguishable from them because of its naturalness. Implying that it is not possible to substitute human synthesis inputs or processes for important attributes of biodiversity that are the outputs of natural evolution and co-evolution.
(The author is former Deputy Conservator, J&K Forest and can be reached [email protected])
