Hyderabad: A workshop on Biodiversity Conservation held at Dr MCR HRD Institute

Hyderabad: "A Worksop on Biodiversity Conservation: The Need for Robust Global and Local Strategies" was conducted at Dr MCR HRD Institute. The event was organized by WWF, India, in collaboration with National Biodiversity Authority (NBA), Ministry of Environment, Forest & Climate Change, Govt of India, UNDP, and Dr MCR HRD Institute.

Around 140 Trainee Civil Servants, including 61 Indian Forest Service (IFS) Officers and 59 Indian Police Service (IPS), were oriented to the development of Post-2020 Global Strategies for Biodiversity Conservation. This was followed by the afternoon session on focused roundtable on the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework, which was attended by representatives from State Biodiversity Boards as well as Members of Civil Service Organizations, from across the country.

Dr V B Mathur, the Chairperson of NBA, in his keynote address, cautioned that nature is undergoing unprecedented loss and, hence, business as usual is not an option anymore. Against this backdrop, he underlined the need for developing a thorough and up-to-date data base on different types of plants and animal lives across the length and breadth of the country and its optimum utilization for achieving sustainable development in multiple domains. He added that a series of consultative workshops will be held in order to learn from the past experience in achieving the targets set for biodiversity conservation and to formulate an innovative, robust, and implementable plan of action to be placed at the upcoming 15th Convention of Parties.

Vishaish Uppal, Director, (Governance, Law and Policy), WWF-India, shared the global concern about nature loss and underlined the urgent need to halt and reverse this phenomenon. "Nature and its ecosystem services benefit people and unless we conserve it we cannot ensure hygienic food, clean water, unpolluted air and good quality life for humanity", she stated. "We need a New Deal for Nature and People in 2020 as we only have one Planet. We must conserve it to secure our future by acting via an integrated approach to Climate, Nature, and Development Agendas", she added.

B P Acharya, D-G of MCR HRDI, underlined the need for a strong political and administrative will to prioritise the Biodiversity Conservation. "State Biodiversity Boards are at the centre of many biodiversity conservation initiatives and need to be proactively involved in their conceptualisation and execution, across all the States," he opined and added that while the initiatives at global and national levels for Biodiversity Conservation are important in their own right, there is a pressing need for much greater decentralized work at the grassroots level and thereby preparation of People Biodiversity Registers at the village level. He also underlined the need for documentation of best practices in Biodiversity Conservation for wider dissemination of knowledge across the country.