'Huge gap in investments for biodiversity conservation'

Resource mobilisation through India's own schemes is essential to address the "huge gap" in international investments to achieve national biodiversity conservation targets, a Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC) official said here on Thursday.

India, a signatory to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and pursuant to the global agreement, has a national biodiversity strategy and action plan for implementing the convention at the national level.

It now has 12 National Biodiversity Targets which form the blueprint for biodiversity conservation in the country.

"There is a huge gap in investments and we need substantial investments to meet those targets," Sujata Arora, CBD Primary National Focal Point, MoEFCC, said here.

"The CBD provides that the developed countries... have to provide funds to the developing nation parties to meet the targets. But the developed countries now say that India is now almost at their level... so getting the funding is a major concern," she said.

Arora was speaking at the 'Understanding the National Biodiversity Targets and the Biodiversity Act' workshop organised by the Centre for Environment Communication and West Bengal Biodiversity Board.

Emphasising the need to look into India's own schemes, Arora said the current thought process on resource mobilisation focuses on sensitising ministries who unknowingly contribute to biodiversity conservation.

"Many a time, these ministries do not know that they are contributing to biodiversity conservation through their schemes because their mandate is different. We have identified the ministries and their schemes and how much funding goes into that and trying to understand what percentage of the scheme could be given to biodiversity," Arora said.

She explained: "... by tweaking something in the scheme... say if one per cent of the scheme (the funding) goes for biodiversity conservation... by tweaking a little bit, may be the contribution could be five per cent."

--IANS

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