Biodiversity and Conservation

Biodiversity means the variety of life on Earth at every level: genes inside a species, species inside a habitat and ecosystems inside a landscape. The word was popularised in the 1980s by the biologist E. O. Wilson. Think of it as the insurance policy of the planet: the more variety there is, the better nature can survive a drought, a disease or a change of climate, and the more choices humans have for food, medicine and materials.

Ecologists also measure diversity at three scales (Whittaker): alpha diversity is the number of species within one habitat, beta diversity is the change in species from one habitat to the next, and gamma diversity is the total diversity of a whole region. Two natural patterns are worth remembering. First, biodiversity is highest near the equator and falls towards the poles (the latitudinal gradient), because the tropics have warm weather, steady sunshine and had more time and stability to evolve. Second, a larger area holds more species (the species-area relationship).

India is one of the 17 megadiverse countries of the world, a small club of nations that together hold the majority of the world's species. India has only about 2.4 per cent of the world's land area but around 7 to 8 per cent of all recorded species. The reason is its variety: the Himalaya, the desert, the plains, the peninsula, two island groups, a long coastline, and the meeting of three biogeographic realms (Indo-Malayan, Palearctic and Afrotropical). The Wildlife Institute of India recognises 10 biogeographic zones in the country.

A biodiversity hotspot is a region that is both extremely rich in endemic species and badly threatened. The idea was given by the British ecologist Norman Myers in 1988, and Conservation International later adopted it. To be called a hotspot, a region must satisfy two conditions: it must contain at least 1,500 species of endemic vascular plants, and it must have lost at least 70 per cent of its original natural vegetation. Hotspots cover less than 3 per cent of Earth's land but hold more than half of the world's endemic plant species. The world has 36 recognised hotspots (as of 2025).

Extinction is a natural part of life: about 99 per cent of all species that ever lived are gone. What worries scientists today is the speed. Earth has seen five mass extinctions in its long history, and many biologists warn that human activity is pushing us towards a sixth. The difference this time is that the cause is not a comet or a volcano but us. To save species, we first need to know what is killing them.

Jared Diamond called the first four causes the 'Evil Quartet': habitat loss and fragmentation, over-exploitation, introduction of alien species and co-extinctions. Fragmentation is dangerous even when some forest is left: small patches cannot support animals that need large territories, such as tigers and elephants.

Now the language of risk. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) was founded in 1948 at Fontainebleau in France and has its headquarters at Gland, Switzerland. Its Red List of Threatened Species, started in 1964, is the world's most trusted health record of species. Each species is placed in a category by testing it against criteria such as how fast its population is falling, how small its numbers are and how small its range is. Remember that the Red List is a scientific assessment, not a law: the legal protection of a species in India comes from the Schedules of the Wildlife Protection Act.

Two more boxes complete the picture. Data Deficient (DD) means there is not enough information to judge the risk, and Not Evaluated (NE) means the species has not been assessed yet. The three categories CR, EN and VU together are called 'Threatened'. The IUCN Red List uses a colour scale from black (Extinct) through red to green (Least Concern); the ladder above is read from top (worst) to bottom (best).

Invasive alien species deserve special attention because they quietly destroy native habitats. A species brought from another region finds no natural enemies and spreads like wildfire. In India the usual suspects are Lantana camara (a thorny shrub choking forest floors), Water hyacinth (Eichhornia, called the 'Terror of Bengal' because it chokes ponds and drains oxygen), Parthenium or Congress grass (causes allergies and spoils pastures) and Prosopis juliflora (Vilayati babool). Mikania micrantha, the 'mile-a-minute weed', smothers trees in the north-east. In water, the Nile perch wiped out hundreds of native fish in Lake Victoria in Africa.

Coral reefs show the climate threat most clearly. Corals live in partnership with tiny algae called zooxanthellae, which give them food and colour. When the sea becomes unusually warm, corals expel the algae and turn white. This is coral bleaching. If the warmth lasts, the corals starve and die, and the fish and other creatures that depend on the reef lose their home. Rising ocean acidity from absorbed carbon dioxide also makes it harder for corals to build their limestone skeletons.

If biodiversity is a library, conservation is its fire-safety plan. There are two broad ways to protect a species. In-situ conservation protects it 'in its original place', in the wild habitat where it evolved. Ex-situ conservation protects it 'outside its place', in zoos, gardens and laboratories. Both are needed: in-situ keeps the whole web of life working, and ex-situ is the lifeboat for species whose wild home is already too damaged.

India's protected area network is built on the Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972. The Act lets governments declare four kinds of protected areas: national parks, wildlife sanctuaries, conservation reserves and community reserves. The last two were added by the 2002 amendment. The big difference lies in how much human activity is allowed. A national park gives the strictest protection: no grazing, no private rights, and its boundary cannot be changed lightly. A sanctuary is gentler: some activities such as limited grazing or collection of forest produce may be permitted by the authorities.

A biosphere reserve is a bigger idea than a park: it protects nature and also the people who live around it. It is divided into three zones like the layers of an onion. The core zone is fully protected, the buffer zone around it allows research, education and light use, and the outer transition zone is where villages, farms and sustainable development go on. The idea comes from UNESCO's Man and the Biosphere (MAB) Programme, launched in 1971. In India, a biosphere reserve is notified by the Government of India, and some of them are also recognised internationally in the World Network of Biosphere Reserves.

Conservation is not only done by governments. Sacred groves are patches of forest protected by local communities because of religious beliefs, and the trees and animals inside are treated as the property of a deity. They have survived for centuries without any law and shelter rare plants, water sources and wildlife. They are called Kavu in Kerala, Devarakadu in Karnataka, Orans in Rajasthan, Devrai in Maharashtra and Law Kyntang in Meghalaya.

When a species is in free fall, India does not rely on general protection alone. It launches a dedicated project, with money, trained staff and a named target. The pattern is the same each time: pick a flagship species, protect its habitat, so that hundreds of other species under its 'umbrella' are saved too. Let us walk through the flagship projects one by one, because examiners love their launch years, states and key facts.

Project Tiger began in 1973 when India was afraid of losing its national animal. It started with nine reserves: Corbett, Palamau, Simlipal, Sundarbans, Kanha, Manas, Melghat, Ranthambore and Bandipur. Each tiger reserve has a core area with full protection and a buffer area where local people and wildlife share the landscape. After tigers vanished from Sariska in 2004, a Tiger Task Force was formed, and the NTCA was made a statutory body under the Wildlife (Protection) Act in 2006. The tiger is counted every four years in the All India Tiger Estimation; the 2022 round, announced in 2023, put the population at about 3,682. Today India holds the majority of the world's wild tigers.

Project Elephant was launched in 1992 to protect elephants, their habitat and the corridors they use to move between forests, and to reduce human-elephant conflict. The Asian elephant is in Schedule I of the Wildlife Act and listed Endangered by the IUCN. In 2010 the Government declared the elephant India's National Heritage Animal, on the recommendation of the Elephant Task Force. Protection is organised through elephant reserves, which can include forests, farms and villages, and not only parks. The first elephant reserve to be notified was Singhbhum in Jharkhand in 2001. Karnataka has the largest elephant population in India.

Project Cheetah is India's bold attempt to bring back a lost species. The Asiatic cheetah vanished from India in the middle of the twentieth century, and the country was declared to have no cheetahs in 1952, after hunting and loss of grassland. In 2022, under an Action Plan prepared by the Wildlife Institute of India and the NTCA, eight cheetahs from Namibia were released into Kuno National Park in Madhya Pradesh on 17 September; in 2023, twelve more arrived from South Africa. It is described as the world's first inter-continental translocation of a large wild carnivore. Because Kuno is crowded, Gandhi Sagar Wildlife Sanctuary in Madhya Pradesh, on the Chambal river, was prepared as the second site. The cheetahs are African (Acinonyx jubatus jubatus) and not the Asiatic ones that were once found here.

The newest idea is global. The International Big Cat Alliance (IBCA) was launched by India in Mysuru on 9 April 2023, as Project Tiger completed fifty years. It brings together countries that are home to the seven big cats: tiger, lion, leopard, snow leopard, cheetah, jaguar and puma. India is the initiator and lead coordinator, and the alliance is based on sharing data, research and money. In India the nodal organisation is the National Tiger Conservation Authority.

India is home to some of the most spectacular and most threatened animals on Earth. For the exam, do not memorise a random list. Link each species with three things: where it lives (the park or state), how threatened it is (the Red List category) and the one special fact that makes it famous. Once the species has a place and a story, the question 'which state?' or 'which park?' becomes easy.

Vultures deserve a story of their own because it shows how one small mistake can bring down an entire species. In the 1990s three common vultures of India (white-rumped, long-billed and slender-billed) began to vanish from the skies, falling by more than ninety per cent in just a few years. The cause was a painkiller called diclofenac, given to cattle. When a vulture fed on a dead animal that had been treated with it, the bird's kidneys failed. India banned diclofenac for veterinary use in 2006 and set up conservation breeding centres, run by the Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS) and others, at Pinjore in Haryana, Buxa in West Bengal and Rani near Guwahati in Assam. Vultures are nature's cleaning crew; without them carcasses rot, and diseases and feral dogs spread.

The Government has also given India national symbols from the animal world. The tiger (Panthera tigris) is the national animal. The Indian peafowl (Pavo cristatus) is the national bird and is protected in Schedule I of the Wildlife Act. The Ganges river dolphin was declared the National Aquatic Animal in 2009, and the elephant became the National Heritage Animal in 2010. Remember that the tiger replaced the lion as the national animal in 1973, the year Project Tiger started.

Conservation needs laws with teeth. The Wild Life (Protection) Act, 1972 is the backbone of wildlife law in India. Before it, each state had its own weak rules. The Act banned hunting of listed animals, created the legal categories of protected areas, controlled trade in wildlife and set up authorities to enforce all this. It has been amended many times, most importantly in 1991, 2002, 2006 and 2022. Alongside it, India is part of global treaties that protect species and genes across borders. This topic joins the two: our own law, and the world's rules.

Schedules are the heart of the Act. Originally there were six: Schedule I and part of Schedule II gave the highest protection (tiger, lion, elephant, rhino, Great Indian Bustard, dugong), Schedules III and IV protected animals with lighter penalties, Schedule V listed vermin (such as crows and rats) that could be hunted, and Schedule VI listed specially protected plants. The Wild Life (Protection) Amendment Act, 2022 cut the six schedules to four: Schedule I (animals, highest protection), Schedule II (animals, lesser protection), Schedule III (specified plants) and Schedule IV (specimens listed in the CITES Appendices). The vermin schedule was removed, and the Act now helps India meet its CITES duties and allows the Government to regulate invasive alien species.

Biodiversity does not stop at borders, so the world has made treaties. The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), signed in 1973 and in force from 1975, controls trade through three Appendices. The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) was opened for signature at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 and has three goals: conserving biodiversity, using it sustainably and sharing its benefits fairly. Two protocols follow from it. The Cartagena Protocol (2000) deals with the safe handling of living modified organisms (GMOs). The Nagoya Protocol (2010) deals with Access and Benefit Sharing: if a company makes a medicine from a village's traditional plant, the village must share the profit.

The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF), adopted in December 2022, is often called the 'Paris Agreement for nature'. Its best-known target is '30 by 30': protect at least 30 per cent of the world's land, inland waters, coasts and oceans by 2030. It also has 23 targets for 2030, including restoring degraded ecosystems, cutting harm from invasive species and pollution, and mobilising at least 200 billion US dollars a year for biodiversity from all sources by 2030. At the resumed COP16 in Rome in February 2025, countries agreed on a strategy to mobilise this money and a roadmap for a permanent financial mechanism. In India, the matching law is the Biological Diversity Act, 2002. It created the National Biodiversity Authority (Chennai), State Biodiversity Boards and Biodiversity Management Committees in local bodies, which prepare People's Biodiversity Registers.