Ecosystem Management and Conservation

• Ecosystem management is a process that aims to conserve major ecological services and restore natural resources while meeting the socio-economic, political and cultural needs of present and future generations.
  • Its principal objective is the efficient maintenance and ethical use of natural resources.
  • It is a multifaceted, holistic approach: it changes how natural and human environments are identified, valued and managed, shifting the focus from single species and single resources to whole ecosystems and the people in them.
• Concern for ecosystems has grown over a century of conservation thinking. Conservation has widened from protecting wildlife inside reserves to managing the Earth’s entire life-support system under climate change, population growth and rising resource demand.
• Two themes run through every definition:
  • management should maintain or improve ecosystems; and
  • ecosystems should keep providing a range of goods and services to current and future generations.
  • These twin commitments, ecological integrity and sustained human benefit, define the field.

Ecosystem Management: Concept and Principles

Geography Optional Notes {PDF}

Complete Notes Package (Paper I & II) | 3000+ Pages | Instant Download

Discounted Price | Buy Now @ ₹1,180 →

Why ecosystems cannot simply be “preserved”

• Ecosystems are dynamic. They change constantly through succession, disturbance and adaptation, so freezing them in one state is neither possible nor desirable.
• Humans are part of many ecosystems. The ecological niche occupied by human communities cannot suddenly be left vacant when a reserve is declared.
  • Early East African national parks showed the cost of ignoring this. With traditional hunting excluded, elephant and hippopotamus numbers built up in some parks until browsing and grazing stripped woodland and grass cover: the animals devastated their own habitat.
• The lesson is that management must work with ecosystem processes and with local people, not around them. The structure and functioning being managed are owned by the ecosystem concept itself: energy flow, nutrient cycles, resilience and services.

Evolving definitions of ecosystem management

• Organisations and scholars have defined the idea with different emphases. Read in sequence, the definitions show its growth from a technical forestry concern into a holistic socio-ecological governance framework.

• Six components are common to these definitions:
  • Multi-level biodiversity: connections among genes, species, populations, ecosystems and landscapes, not just headline species.
  • Ecological boundaries: watersheds, landscapes and seascapes instead of administrative units, at spatial and temporal scales that match the processes managed.
  • People as part of nature: human society is an integral component of ecosystems, not an external threat to be excluded.
  • Emulating natural disturbance: fire, flood and grazing regimes are mimicked to keep diversity and prevent uniform, monoculture-like stands.
  • Long-term planning: decades, not annual budget cycles, because ecosystem processes are slow.
  • Adaptive management: management as an experiment, monitored, documented and adjusted.

From resource management to ecosystem management

• Ecosystem management is therefore the resource-level expression of the wider ecosystem approach to environmental management, which also weighs its advantages and drawbacks as a planning philosophy.

The CBD ecosystem approach

• The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) adopted the ecosystem approach as the primary framework for action under the Convention at its fifth Conference of the Parties (COP5), Nairobi, 2000, in Decision V/6.
  • Definition: a strategy for the integrated management of land, water and living resources that promotes conservation and sustainable use in an equitable way.
  • It balances the Convention’s three objectives: conservation, sustainable use, and fair and equitable sharing of benefits.
  • It recognises that humans, with their cultural diversity, are an integral component of many ecosystems.
  • An ecosystem can be of any scale: a pond, a forest, a river basin or the biosphere. The problem being addressed decides the scale.
• Origin of the principles: the twelve principles were drafted at a workshop in Lilongwe, Malawi (26–28 January 1998), hence the name “Malawi principles”. They were reported to COP4 (Bratislava, 1998) and endorsed with Decision V/6. COP7 (2004) added implementation guidance.

The twelve principles of the ecosystem approach

• Five points of operational guidance accompany the principles:
  1. Focus on the functional relationships and processes within ecosystems.
  2. Enhance benefit-sharing.
  3. Use adaptive management practices.
  4. Act at the scale appropriate to the issue, with decentralisation to the lowest level where possible.
  5. Ensure intersectoral cooperation.
• Principle 10 is a deliberate break from the old divide between fully protected and unprotected land. It is the root of today’s mosaic and landscape approaches that mix reserves, community lands and production land.

Adaptive management

• Adaptive management treats every management action as an experiment: it is carried out, monitored, evaluated and adjusted in the light of what is learnt.
  • It was formalised by Crawford Stanley “Buzz” Holling (1978) in Adaptive Environmental Assessment and Management and developed by Carl J. Walters (1986) for fisheries and other renewable resources.
• Why it is needed: ecosystems are complex, non-linear and uncertain. Thresholds are unknown until crossed, so a fixed plan is bound to fail somewhere.
• The cycle: assess the problem → design with explicit goals and hypotheses → implement → monitor → evaluate → adjust → back to assessment.
• Two forms:
  • Passive: apply the best current model and update it as monitoring results come in.
  • Active: deliberately run alternative treatments side by side (for example, different grazing intensities in different blocks) to test competing hypotheses faster.
• Pre-conditions: clear goals, baseline data, long-term monitoring, flexible institutions and willingness to admit error. The usual failure is that the monitoring and evaluation steps are skipped once funds are spent.
• Indian example: fire, grazing and invasive-species management in tiger reserves and grasslands (for example, removal of Lantana and Prosopis juliflora, or controlled burning in terai grasslands) is reviewed through periodic tiger-reserve management plans and evaluations.

Ecosystem-Based Approaches and Planning Units

• Ecosystem management rests on ecosystem-based approaches: strategies that use nature’s own processes rather than only engineered solutions to manage resources equitably and sustainably.

Ecosystem-based adaptation (EbA)

• EbA is the use of biodiversity and ecosystem services as part of an overall adaptation strategy to help people adapt to the adverse effects of climate change (CBD expert group, 2009).
  • Instead of relying only on grey infrastructure (sea walls, embankments, pipes, reservoirs), EbA uses healthy ecosystems as natural infrastructure, often at lower cost and with ecological co-benefits.
• EbA in practice:
  • Mangrove coastal protection: mangroves buffer storm surges, reduce wave energy, trap sediment and store carbon.
    • In the 1999 Odisha super cyclone, villages in Kendrapada district shielded by wider mangrove belts suffered significantly fewer deaths, a result shown by Saudamini Das and Jeffrey R. Vincent (2009).
    • About 4.5 million people live in the Indian Sundarbans, behind the world’s largest mangrove forest.
  • Watershed-based flood control: intact forests and wetlands in catchments absorb rainfall, regulate river flow and reduce flash floods, often more cheaply than engineered structures.
  • Urban green infrastructure: trees, parks, green roofs and urban wetlands reduce the urban heat island, manage stormwater, improve air quality and support mental health. The East Kolkata Wetlands, a Ramsar site, treat much of the city’s sewage through fisheries.
  • Agroforestry: trees on farms shade crops and livestock, store carbon, check soil erosion, diversify income and support pollinators. Agroforestry and social forestry are the Indian vehicles.
• Integrating EbA into policy:
  • Make EbA an integral part of climate policy at international, national and regional levels.
  • Build it into National Adaptation Plans (NAPs), the successors of the least-developed countries’ NAPAs, and ecosystem-based mitigation into Nationally Appropriate Mitigation Actions (NAMAs).
  • Integrate ecosystem conservation into national development and adaptation plans, as India’s State Action Plans on Climate Change attempt.
• Nature-based solutions (NbS) is the umbrella term now used. The UN Environment Assembly (UNEA-5, March 2022) defined NbS as actions to protect, conserve, restore, sustainably use and manage ecosystems that address social, economic and environmental challenges while benefiting people and biodiversity. EbA is NbS applied to adaptation.

The watershed as an ecosystem unit

• A watershed (catchment or drainage basin) is the area that drains to a common outlet, bounded by the water divide along the ridges. It is the most natural planning unit for ecosystem management, for several reasons.
• It has a natural boundary. Water, sediment, nutrients and pollutants move downslope within it, so causes and effects stay inside one unit.
• It behaves as an open ecosystem with measurable budgets:
  • Inputs: precipitation, solar energy, dust, atmospheric nitrogen.
  • Internal processes: infiltration, evapotranspiration, weathering, nutrient cycling, plant growth.
  • Outputs: streamflow, sediment, dissolved nutrients and solutes leaving at the outlet, where they can be gauged.
  • The Hubbard Brook Ecosystem Study (New Hampshire, USA, from 1963) of F. Herbert Bormann and Gene E. Likens used small forested watersheds as ecosystem units. Clear-felling one watershed sharply raised streamflow and nitrate loss, proving that vegetation regulates the whole system’s water and nutrient budget.
• It integrates land and water. Every land-use decision on the slopes (forest, farm, road, town) shows up in the quantity and quality of water downstream.
• It is nested: micro-watersheds combine into milli-watersheds, sub-watersheds, watersheds, catchments and basins. Planning can be done at the village micro-watershed (about 100–1,000 ha) and still add up to a river basin. India’s delineation and size classes follow this hierarchy.
• It links upstream and downstream people.
  • Upland communities bear the cost of conservation (closing grazing land, building structures).
  • Lowland users gain cleaner, steadier water and less silt and flooding.
  • This makes the watershed a natural unit for benefit-sharing, a CBD principle.

Why the watershed suits sustainable development

• Economic: soil and water conservation raise yields, cropping intensity and fodder; groundwater recharge stabilises wells; income diversifies into dairy, horticulture and fisheries.
• Ecological: it restores vegetation, checks erosion and siltation, recharges aquifers and revives springs and streams.
• Social: it needs community institutions (watershed committees, user groups, self-help groups), so it builds local governance, equity in water sharing and women’s participation.
• Intergenerational: soil, water and biomass are rebuilt as natural capital instead of being mined.
• Sequence of treatment, ridge to valley:
  • upper slopes and ridge: afforestation, contour trenches, closure to grazing;
  • middle slopes (arable land): contour and graded bunds, terraces, agroforestry;
  • drainage lines: gully plugs, check dams, nala bunds, percolation tanks;
  • valley floor: farm ponds, efficient irrigation, crop diversification.
  • Treating from the top down means that structures below are not silted by erosion above, the logic of soil conservation from ridge to valley.

Indian experience

• Sukhomajri (Haryana, late 1970s): small earthen dams in the Shivalik foothills, with community control of grazing and shared water rights, cut silting of Chandigarh’s Sukhna Lake and raised crop and grass yields.
• Ralegan Siddhi and Hiware Bazar (Maharashtra): drought-prone villages turned green through community watershed work, bans on free grazing and tree felling, and village water budgeting.
• National programmes: the Drought Prone Areas Programme (1973–74), Desert Development Programme (1977–78), the watershed guidelines of 1994 and 2008, the Integrated Watershed Management Programme (2009–10), and the Watershed Development Component of PMKSY 2.0 (2021–26), with ₹8,134 crore for about 49.5 lakh ha.
• Weaknesses: poor maintenance after project periods, capture of benefits by larger landholders, little attention to landless and pastoral users, and downstream impacts of too many structures upstream.

Watershed management in hilly regions

• Why hills need it most: steep slopes, intense monsoon rain, fragile rocks and shallow soils combine with road cutting, deforestation, and short-fallow jhum to cause rapid runoff, landslides and soil loss.
• Springsheds: most Himalayan households depend on springs. A NITI Aayog working group (2018) estimated about 5 million springs in India, about 3 million of them in the Indian Himalayan Region, and reported that nearly half of the perennial springs have dried or become seasonal.
  • Springshed management maps the recharge area using hydrogeology and treats it with trenches, ponds and vegetation. Sikkim’s Dhara Vikas programme (2008) is the model.
• Core measures: bench terracing, contour trenching, catchment afforestation, check dams and gabions in torrents, controlled grazing and water-harvesting tanks.
• Mountain-specific services and highland–lowland linkages are part of mountain ecosystem management.

Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM)

• IWRM is a process that promotes the coordinated development and management of water, land and related resources to maximise economic and social welfare equitably without compromising the sustainability of vital ecosystems (Global Water Partnership, 2000).
  • It replaced the sectoral approach, in which irrigation, drinking water, industry and river conservation were run by separate agencies with conflicting mandates.
• Roots: the Dublin Principles (1992): fresh water is finite and vulnerable; development should be participatory; women play a central part; water has an economic value.
• Key features:
  • The river basin or watershed is the unit of management, matching ecological rather than administrative boundaries.
  • Stakeholder participation: local communities, farmers, industries and downstream users.
  • Environmental flows (e-flows): the quantity, timing and quality of flow needed to sustain river ecosystems are built into allocation.
  • Surface water and groundwater, quantity and quality, are managed together.
• India:
  • The National Water Policy (2012) calls for planning on an IWRM basis with the river basin or sub-basin as the unit, and for a portion of river flow to be kept aside for ecological needs.
  • The Ganga e-flow notification (October 2018) set minimum flows for the upper Ganga and its main stem.
  • Inter-state and international river water disputes show the difficulty of basin-level management across political boundaries.
• Global examples: the Murray–Darling Basin Plan (Australia, 2012), which buys back water for the environment, and the Mekong River Commission (1995).

Coastal zone management and marine spatial planning

• Marine Spatial Planning (MSP) is a public process of analysing and allocating the spatial and temporal distribution of human activities in marine areas to achieve ecological, economic and social objectives set through a political process (UNESCO-IOC).
  • It is the marine equivalent of land-use planning: zones for conservation, fisheries, shipping, aquaculture, tourism and offshore energy within one framework.
• Integrated Coastal Zone Management (ICZM) treats the land–sea interface as one system, linking catchments, estuaries, beaches and the nearshore sea.
• India’s Coastal Regulation Zone (CRZ) framework:
  • It began with the CRZ Notification of 1991 under the Environment (Protection) Act, 1986, and was replaced in 2011 and again in 2019.
  • CRZ 2019 categories:
    • CRZ-I: ecologically sensitive areas such as mangroves, coral reefs, salt marshes and turtle nesting grounds (IA), and the intertidal zone (IB); development is largely barred.
    • CRZ-II: developed, urban coastal areas.
    • CRZ-III: relatively undisturbed, mainly rural areas. IIIA (density above 2,161 persons per km²) has a No Development Zone of 50 m from the high tide line; IIIB keeps 200 m.
    • CRZ-IV: the water area up to 12 nautical miles and tidal water bodies, where traditional fishing is protected.
    • Islands (Andaman and Nicobar, Lakshadweep) are governed by separate island plans, with a 20 m No Development Zone for small islands.
  • Criticism: successive revisions have relaxed buffers (for example, 200 m to 50 m in dense rural coasts) and eased tourism and infrastructure, weakening protection of mangroves, dunes and fishers’ commons.
• India’s MSP: with Norway, India prepared its first MSP frameworks for Puducherry and Lakshadweep (February 2023), using spatial data to screen new proposals for conflicts with other sectors.
• Other coastal tools: the World Bank-assisted ICZM project (Gujarat, Odisha, West Bengal), the MISHTI mangrove plantation scheme (2023) and the coral reef management of the Gulf of Mannar and Gulf of Kachchh.
• High seas: the BBNJ Agreement (High Seas Treaty) on marine biodiversity beyond national jurisdiction entered into force on 17 January 2026, allowing marine protected areas and environmental assessments on the high seas.

Ecosystem-specific management

• Management is tailored to the ecological, social and economic character of each ecosystem type; each faces distinct pressures.

Ecosystem Restoration

Concept: the restorative continuum

• Ecological restoration is the process of assisting the recovery of an ecosystem that has been degraded, damaged or destroyed (Society for Ecological Restoration, SER).
• The SER International Standards (second edition, 2019) place restoration on a restorative continuum of four families of activity. Moving left to right, both ecological health and the quality and quantity of ecosystem services rise:
  1. Reduced societal impacts: less damaging ways of producing and consuming (ecologically informed farming, forestry, fisheries, mining).
  2. Remediation: removing pollutants and contaminants from soil and water.
  3. Rehabilitation: repairing ecosystem functions (soil, water, productivity) without aiming for the full native community; on mined land it is called reclamation.
  4. Ecological restoration: recovery of a native ecosystem towards its reference state, the condition it would be in had degradation not occurred.
• Recovery is measured against a reference ecosystem across six key attributes: absence of threats, physical conditions, species composition, structural diversity, ecosystem function and external exchanges. A five-star scale grades progress on each.
• What does not count: an activity that causes net harm, such as afforesting native grasslands with exotic trees, is not restorative, however many trees it plants.
• Related terms: afforestation (trees on land not recently forested), reforestation (replanting cleared forest), rewilding (restoring natural processes, often by reintroducing key species) and forest landscape restoration (a mosaic approach that mixes forest, farm and agroforestry for people and nature).

The UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration (2021–2030)

• Origin: proposed by El Salvador with the backing of more than 70 countries, it was proclaimed by the UN General Assembly in resolution 73/284 on 1 March 2019. It was launched on World Environment Day, 5 June 2021.
• Leadership: co-led by UNEP and FAO, with partners such as IUCN, the Society for Ecological Restoration and the Global Landscapes Forum.
• Mandate: to prevent, halt and reverse the degradation of ecosystems worldwide, on land, in freshwater and in the ocean, and to build a global movement (#GenerationRestoration).
• Timing: the Decade runs to 2030, the deadline of the SDGs and of most restoration pledges, and the period that science identifies as decisive for averting dangerous climate change.
• What it aims to deliver:
  • Restoring 350 million ha of degraded land and water ecosystems by 2030 could generate up to US$9 trillion in ecosystem services and remove 13–26 Gt of greenhouse gases.
  • Countries have already pledged to restore about 1 billion ha, an area larger than China.
• Links to other goals:
  • SDG 15 (life on land), SDG 14 (life below water), SDG 6 (water) and target 15.3 on land degradation neutrality.
  • The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (2022): Target 2 asks that 30% of degraded ecosystems be under effective restoration by 2030, alongside Target 3, the 30×30 protected-area target. These are set out under the CBD and sustainable development.
  • The three Rio Conventions (CBD, UNFCCC, UNCCD).
• Ten principles for ecosystem restoration (FAO, IUCN and SER, 2021) guide the Decade:

• World Restoration Flagships: the Decade’s recognition for the best large-scale, long-term initiatives.
  • The first ten flagships were announced at CBD COP15, Montreal, in December 2022. Together they aim to restore over 68 million ha and create nearly 15 million jobs.
  • India’s Namami Gange (Ganga river rejuvenation) was among them, along with Africa’s Great Green Wall, the Trinational Atlantic Forest Pact (Brazil, Paraguay, Argentina) and the Central American Dry Corridor.
  • Further rounds in 2024 and 2025 brought the total to 30 flagships by December 2025, with over 18 million ha already under restoration.

Balancing ecological goals with food security and development

• The apparent conflict: land restored to forest or wetland may seem to be land taken from farming, grazing or industry, at a time when food demand and development needs are rising.
• How the Decade reconciles them:
  • Restoration includes production landscapes. The continuum covers rehabilitation of farmland, rangeland and urban land, not only wild nature. Restoring soil health, pollinators and water cycles raises food output: more than 75% of leading food crop types rely at least partly on animal pollination.
  • Land sharing and mosaics: agroforestry, silvopasture, shelterbelts and farmer-managed natural regeneration (FMNR) grow trees with crops.
    • In Niger, FMNR spread by Tony Rinaudo from 1983 has regreened about 5 million ha with over 200 million trees, raising grain and fodder yields.
  • Targeting degraded and abandoned land, not productive cropland, for restoration.
  • Jobs and livelihoods: restoration is labour-intensive. The first ten flagships alone expect nearly 15 million jobs, and India’s restoration of 21.76 million ha in 2011–2020 generated about 1.22 billion person-days of employment.
  • Rights and participation: Principle 2 calls for free, prior and informed consent, secure tenure and fair sharing of benefits, so that restoration does not dispossess farmers, pastoralists or forest dwellers.
  • Disaster risk reduction and climate adaptation protect development gains: mangroves, floodplains and catchment forests cut losses from cyclones, floods and droughts.
  • Finance for green jobs: payments for ecosystem services, carbon markets and green credits pay landholders for restoring land.
• Persistent tensions:
  • Monoculture plantations counted as “restoration” deliver few biodiversity benefits.
  • Tree-planting on grasslands and savannas, often classed as “wastelands” in India, harms pastoralists and grassland species such as the great Indian bustard.
  • Carbon offset projects can lock land away from local use.
  • Pledges far exceed delivery, and monitoring is weak.

The Bonn Challenge and related targets

• Bonn Challenge (2011): launched by Germany and IUCN to bring 150 million ha of degraded and deforested land into restoration by 2020.
  • The New York Declaration on Forests (2014) extended it to 350 million ha by 2030.
  • Its method is forest landscape restoration (FLR): restoring ecological functionality and human well-being across whole landscapes.
  • Regional platforms carry it forward: AFR100 in Africa and Initiative 20×20 in Latin America.
• Land degradation neutrality (LDN): under the UNCCD, and as SDG target 15.3, countries aim to ensure that new degradation is balanced by restoration, so that the amount of healthy land stays stable or grows.
• Great Green Wall (2007): an African Union initiative to restore 100 million ha across the Sahel by 2030. It began as a line of trees and has become a mosaic of land-use practices.
• Kunming-Montreal GBF Target 2: 30% of degraded ecosystems under effective restoration by 2030.

India’s restoration commitments

• Bonn Challenge pledge: India joined in 2015 with 13 million ha by 2020 and raised it at UNCCD COP14 (New Delhi, September 2019) to restore 26 million ha of degraded land by 2030.
  • India’s second progress report, presented at UNCCD COP17 (Ulaanbaatar, August 2026), records 21.76 million ha restored in 2011–2020 and about 1.22 billion person-days of employment.
• Climate targets with an ecosystem element:
  • India’s updated NDC (2022) pledged an additional carbon sink of 2.5–3 billion tonnes CO₂-equivalent through forest and tree cover by 2030.
  • The 2035 NDC (submitted April 2026) raises this to 3.5–4 billion tonnes and the emissions-intensity cut to 47% below 2005 levels.
• Main vehicles:
  • Green India Mission (a mission under the National Action Plan on Climate Change): increase forest and tree cover on 5 million ha and improve its quality on another 5 million ha.
  • Watershed Development Component of PMKSY, the National Afforestation Programme, CAMPA funds, Nagar Van Yojana (urban forests), MISHTI (mangroves, about 540 km² across nine coastal states and four UTs) and Amrit Dharohar (Ramsar sites), both launched in 2023.
  • The Aravalli Green Wall (launched 5 June 2025): a 5-km green belt around the Aravalli range across Gujarat, Rajasthan, Haryana and Delhi.
• Restoration in practice: Chilika Lake (Odisha):
  • Silting had choked the lagoon’s mouth, salinity and fish catch had fallen, and the lake was placed on the Ramsar Montreux Record of threatened sites in 1993.
  • The Chilika Development Authority cut a new mouth to the sea in 2000. Tidal exchange and salinity recovered, fish landings rose, and Irrawaddy dolphins and migratory birds returned.
  • Chilika was removed from the Montreux Record in 2002: a classic case of restoration that served both ecology and the livelihoods of fishers.
• Other Indian examples: the Aravalli Biodiversity Park in Gurugram, restored from a mining wasteland and recognised as India’s first OECM (other effective area-based conservation measure); dune stabilisation in western Rajasthan; and reclamation of degraded land in mined areas.

Global Frameworks, Finance and Valuation

Global Environment Facility (GEF)

• Global initiatives provide the frameworks, finance and targets needed for international action. Without global coordination, national efforts stay fragmented and too small for planetary-scale problems.
• The GEF (set up in 1991, restructured after the 1992 Rio Earth Summit) is the main multilateral fund for the global environment.
  • It is the financial mechanism for the CBD, UNFCCC, UNCCD, the Stockholm Convention on persistent organic pollutants and the Minamata Convention on mercury.
  • Agencies such as UNEP, UNDP, FAO and the World Bank use GEF grants and co-financing to help countries promote integrated land and water management that protects ecosystem services.
• Replenishments:
  • GEF-8 (July 2022–June 2026): US$5.33 billion, the largest in its history, for biodiversity, climate change, land degradation, international waters and chemicals.
  • GEF-9 (July 2026–June 2030): an initial envelope of US$3.9 billion, pledged in April 2026 and endorsed by the GEF Council around the Eighth GEF Assembly in Samarkand, Uzbekistan (May–June 2026). That is about a quarter smaller than GEF-8, at a time when the GBF and restoration targets need more money.
• India and the GEF: India is both a contributor to the GEF Trust Fund and a recipient.
  • Grants have supported biodiversity (Western Ghats, Sundarbans, SECURE Himalaya), sustainable land and ecosystem management, renewable energy and international waters.
  • By the mid-2010s India had used more than US$500 million in GEF grants, leveraging about US$3 billion in co-financing.

Ecosystems in the global carbon balance

• Climate stabilisation cannot be achieved by cutting fossil emissions alone. It also needs active management of the global carbon cycle through ecosystem protection and restoration.
• The three-way balance:
  • Climate stability depends on the capacity of global ecosystems to absorb greenhouse gases minus (emissions from ecosystems + emissions from human activity).
• The current budget (Global Carbon Budget 2025):
  • Fossil CO₂ emissions reached a record of about 38.1 Gt CO₂ in 2025. Land-use change, mainly deforestation, added about 4.1 Gt CO₂, for a total of about 42 Gt CO₂.
  • Over 2015–2024, the ocean absorbed about 29% of these emissions and the land about 21%. The remaining 49% stayed in the atmosphere.
  • Climate change is weakening the sinks: over 2015–2024 the land sink was about 25% smaller, and the ocean sink about 7% smaller, than they would have been without climate change.
• The dangerous paradox: as human emissions rise, emissions from ecosystems tend to rise too, through positive feedbacks:
  • permafrost thaw releases methane and CO₂;
  • drought and fire kill forests;
  • peatlands dry and burn;
  • warming oceans absorb less.
  • At the same time, the capacity of ecosystems to absorb emissions falls.
• Three components must all be managed:
  • Maximise absorption: protect and restore forests, wetlands, seagrass beds, mangroves and peatlands as sinks.
  • Minimise ecosystem emissions: halt deforestation and wetland drainage, prevent peat fires and manage fire regimes.
  • Reduce human emissions: decarbonise energy, transport, industry and agriculture, the core of carbon neutrality and net zero.
  • Concentrating on only the third, as climate policy long did, risks insufficient stabilisation even if emission targets are met.
• Human activity has upset the carbon cycle in two ways: by creating large new sources (fossil fuels) and by degrading natural sinks (deforestation, wetland drainage, soil degradation, ocean acidification). Ecosystem management is the main lever on the sink side of the equation.

Ecosystems as the “win-win-win” link

• An ecosystem approach can meet mitigation, adaptation and long-term sustainability objectives at the same time. This triple benefit makes ecosystem management different from single-purpose interventions.
• The four wins:
  • Social: livelihoods, health, cultural values and community support.
  • Economic: resilient ecosystems keep supplying the services on which all economic activity depends.
  • Climate: mitigation through sequestration; adaptation through ecosystem resilience.
  • Environmental: healthy ecosystems sustain biodiversity and long-term sustainability.
• Profit from healthy ecosystems is now captured through payments for ecosystem services (PES), REDD+ carbon finance, sustainable fisheries certification and ecotourism. These turn the value of services into direct financial incentives for conservation.

Ecosystems as a safety net

• An ecosystem approach at a global scale is a safety net against the failure of emission-reduction efforts. There is no guarantee that targets are correct for stabilisation, or that they will be met.
• By the precautionary principle, ecosystems must be protected as a primary mechanism of climate regulation and as the foundation of an adapting society: a complement to emission cuts, never a substitute.
• The critical challenge: conventional cost-benefit analysis and risk assessment cannot handle the deep uncertainty of ecosystem responses to climate change. Without knowing the resilience thresholds of ecosystems, the strength of the safety net is unknown. That needs more research on biodiversity and ecosystem processes, vulnerability mapping and monitoring of ecosystem health.

People in the balance

• Management must balance many opposing demands within socio-ecological systems.
  • The aspirations of the poor, for whom ecosystems provide basic livelihoods, must be respected and supported.
  • Meanwhile, excessive consumption by the wealthy drives degradation that harms the poor most.
• Behaviour changes when there is (a) an economic benefit and (b) a clear rationale for change. New economic systems, societal ethics and an ethos of collective responsibility, supported by education, are therefore preconditions for effective ecosystem management.

Four strategies for prioritising ecosystem protection

• Political commitment: a sense of urgency that raises the profile of ecosystems in climate and sustainability policy at local, national and international levels. Without political will, no technical solution reaches the required scale or speed.
• Investment: explicit inclusion of ecosystem management in climate funds, development finance and national budgets, on a scale that matches the value of ecosystem services, still badly undervalued in economic models.
• Incentives: to reduce emissions, ease pressures on ecosystems and build resilience: carbon pricing, PES, REDD+ finance, and rewards for protecting land and water.
• Information: comprehensive monitoring of environmental variables; closer links between ecosystem management, climate adaptation and disaster risk reduction; North–South and South–South sharing of data; long-term monitoring networks.
• Policy priorities that follow:
  • Governments should fully value the role of healthy ecosystems in mitigation, adaptation and sustainability.
  • Ecosystem emissions and carbon stocks (soils, vegetation, permafrost) should be reported under the UNFCCC and protected from conversion and burning.
  • EbA should be built into national adaptation plans, and ecosystem-based mitigation into NAMAs and NDCs.
  • Climate policy should be aligned with the CBD, the Ramsar Convention and other multilateral environmental agreements.
  • Funding for local projects that build ecosystem resilience should rise, and research on climate–ecosystem feedbacks and society–ecosystem links should be supported.

Valuing ecosystems: the economics of ecosystem management

• Why valuation matters: most ecosystem services (pollination, flood regulation, water purification, climate regulation) are public goods with no market price, so they are treated as free and over-used, a classic market failure.
• Robert Costanza and colleagues (1997) estimated the world’s ecosystem services at about US$33 trillion a year, more than global GDP at the time. A 2014 update put them at about US$125 trillion a year and estimated large annual losses from land-use change.
• TEEB (The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity):
  • It was launched in 2007 by Germany and the European Commission after a proposal of the G8+5 environment ministers at Potsdam, and led by Pavan Sukhdev.
  • Its synthesis report, Mainstreaming the Economics of Nature, was presented at CBD COP10, Nagoya, October 2010. It marked a turning point in how ecosystems are valued and managed.
  • Three-tier approach: recognise value (cultural and spiritual, often enough to protect a sacred grove), demonstrate value in economic terms (to inform a decision), and capture value through policy (PES, taxes, certification, ecological fiscal transfers).
  • The challenge, still unresolved, is to bring these approaches into mainstream decision-making fast enough to halt the decline. Entrenched economic thinking and vested interests are the main obstacles.
• Instruments that capture value:
  • Payments for ecosystem services: for example, Costa Rica’s national PES programme (1997), which pays landowners for forest protection, and payments by downstream water users to upstream communities.
  • Ecological fiscal transfers in India: the 14th Finance Commission gave 7.5% weight to forest cover in sharing central taxes with states, and the 15th gave 10% to forest and ecology. This rewards states for keeping forests.
  • Compensatory afforestation (CAMPA Act, 2016) and net present value charges for diverting forest land.
  • The Green Credit Programme (2023), a market-based incentive for tree planting, water conservation and other environmental actions.
  • Natural capital accounting: the UN System of Environmental-Economic Accounting (SEEA), which India’s statistics ministry has begun to apply in its environment accounts, and ideas such as Green GDP.
• For India, the value at stake is vast: mangroves that shield coastal districts, wetlands that sustain inland fisheries, and Himalayan glaciers and forests that feed the rivers of the Indo-Gangetic Plain. Few of these services are priced. Including them in national accounts would shift the cost-benefit calculus of development decisions.

Transboundary cooperation

• Nature does not recognise political borders. Migratory species, shared rivers, contiguous forests and the atmosphere all operate across jurisdictions, so transboundary cooperation is a structural necessity, not an optional extra.

• Transboundary protected areas (“peace parks”) combine political reconciliation with ecological connectivity.
  • Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park (Canada–USA, 1932) was the first.
  • The Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park (South Africa, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, 2002) and the Kavango-Zambezi (KAZA) Transfrontier Conservation Area (Angola, Botswana, Namibia, Zambia, Zimbabwe) reconnect elephant ranges across southern Africa.
• India’s transboundary ecosystem management:
  • Sundarbans: India and Bangladesh signed an MoU on conserving the Sundarbans and a protocol on the Royal Bengal tiger in 2011. The Indian Sundarbans Tiger Reserve and the Bangladesh Sundarbans Reserved Forest form one mangrove ecosystem.
  • Hindu Kush Himalaya: India is a member of ICIMOD, the intergovernmental centre of eight regional countries for mountain ecosystems, glacier monitoring and water security. The Kangchenjunga Landscape initiative (Bhutan, India, Nepal) and the Transboundary Manas Conservation Area (India–Bhutan) manage shared landscapes.
  • Ganga–Brahmaputra–Meghna basin: Nepal, India, Bangladesh, Bhutan and China share it. Floods, dry-season flows and aquatic species such as the Gangetic dolphin need coordination. The India–Bangladesh Ganges Water Treaty (1996) governs dry-season sharing at Farakka.
  • Corridors for elephants and tigers across the India–Nepal and India–Bhutan borders reduce human–wildlife conflict and keep populations connected.

India’s ecosystem management: achievements and challenges

• Overall assessment: India has strong laws, large programmes and notable community successes. But ecosystem management is still often sectoral (forests, water and agriculture in separate departments), target-driven (hectares planted rather than ecosystems recovered) and weak on monitoring and adaptive learning. The ecosystem approach’s principles of decentralisation, benefit-sharing and intersectoral cooperation remain the main gap.
• These measures are part of India’s broader framework of environmental conservation, with its in-situ and ex-situ biodiversity conservation measures and its environmental policy.