In the midst of a climate emergency, we mark another World Environment Day on Wednesday. As heat sizzles humanity and rain soaks it, climate change dominates conservation conversations. Experts lay the facts: Climate change poses biodiversity and livelihood risks; restoring biodiversity, in turn, can mitigate climate change. And the well-being consequences of conserving and restoring ecosystems are plain.
An international day’s function is raising awareness. In that spirit, let us be aware of two things.
One, biodiversity is unfortunately still not a popular or mainstream concept. Climate change, thanks to its tangible, clear and present danger, has a more successful public ‘career’. Climate links have bolstered biodiversity’s societal values, since the Millennium Ecosystem Assessments (2000) that emphasised ecosystem services including carbon sequestration. As a scientific concept too, biodiversity definitions keep getting updated.
Two, the communication of biodiversity’s well-being value is in utilitarian language. The 1992 Convention of Biological Diversity (CBD) emphasised biodiversity benefits and utilisation: as humanity’s medicinal raw stock at stake, or subsistence income for local livelihoods. The sum of a community or society’s satisfaction has remained biodiversity advocacy’s credo. But it ignores opportunities and freedoms that incomes enable; the quantum of satisfaction trumps quality of life.
Biodiversity conservation has a language problem. A language of abstraction and inadequacy. How can we improve it?
Siddhartha Krishnan | Photo Credit: SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT
Mainstreaming biodiversity
Biodiversity refers to the variability among terrestrial, marine and aquatic organisms, the diversity within and between them, and ecosystems. Despite referring to things concrete, like species and ecosystems, biodiversity is abstract. In both expert and lay minds, there is disagreement and difficulty in what this translates into. An “unapologetically“ scientific term, it has not achieved scientific “parsimony”, a problem-solving principle that assumes that the most acceptable occurrence or event is the simplest, making it even “indefinable“ at times.
Some explanations emphasise elements (species abundance and spatial distribution), while others value ecological functions, with the latter framing being the dominant one. Functions like biomass production, energy and nutrient flows have human well-being benefits. Experts convert these into ecosystem services like provisioning water or regulating floods. And they assign a monetary value to services. The International Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) embodies the institutional success of this framing.
In short, biodiversity is an obscure concept. It does not figure in everyday usage. Even the local translations of the word are all Greek and Latin for respective speakers. Consider jīvavaividhya in Kannada, palluyirmam or paluyiriyam in Tamil or jaiv vividhata in Hindi.
On the other hand, nature, or forest and their vernacular — prakriti or iyarkai, bana, solai, adavi, kadu — evoke more verdant imagery and utility in public minds. Engaging with vernacular diversity is a practical way to convey biodiversity concerns and values. It also helps to understand the plural ways that communities value nature.
‘Jungle ke dost’ (Friends of forest) - women group of volunteers engaged in dousing fire,return after successfully extinguishing a forest fire at Sitlakhet in Uttarakhand on May 06, 2024. | Photo Credit: SHASHI SHEKHAR KASHYAP
Biodiversity and well-being
Localising a global problem like biodiversity loss helps gauge and convey worries and workarounds. Climate change perception research signals such possibilities.
For instance, the ‘seeing is believing’ and ‘psychological distance’ principles condition people’s climate change perceptions. Experience trumps statistical facts in acknowledging climate change while proximity— in time and space —reduces abstraction and enhances concern levels. Also, people are more forthcoming to questions of ‘local warming’ events, rather than global warming. They respond when researchers substitute abstract statistics with accessible attributes, both semantic and experiential. Biodiversity advocates can communicate its significance with appropriate examples.
Mainstreaming biodiversity in policies and practices of government bureaucracies and businesses remains a task since these institutions continue to be mostly occupied with meeting revenue, expenditure or profit targets. While conservation and sustainability are serious state responsibilities and mandated corporate social responsibility (CSR) sees environmental investments, the concept of biodiversity remains confined to academia, NGOs, policy actors, both national and international (the UN) and philanthropies. Even in this confined space, where they evoke biodiversity in all its variability and functionality, the grasp of well-being is inadequate. There is an unevenness; they describe biodiversity well, but notions of well-being are often conjecture.
In 2018, a National Mission on Biodiversity and Human Well-Being (NMBHWB) was approved in India, linking biodiversity to people’s economic prosperity and health. Two years later, in 2020, members of the Biodiversity Collaborative, a network of institutions promoting biodiversity conservation and research, tasked with developing the Preparatory Phase Project for the NMBHWB, penned a piece in the PNAS journal, the prestigious peer-reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). They wrote that conservation will “remain elusive until there is a clear demonstration of the relevance of biodiversity to people’s well-being.“ Further, “the link between biodiversity and human well-being has remained elusive”.
The problem for the authors is under-investment in biodiversity science. But the problem, from a sociological and anthropological perspective, is how biodiversity is relevant to well-being. And how to understand well-being.
File photo of Forest Protection Women activists returning back from inside the Similipal Biosphere as they make an effort to protect their forest from the fire in the buffer area of the Similipal forest near Mandan village in Maurbhanja district of Odisha. | Photo Credit: BISWARANJAN ROUT
Human development language
Ecologists and biodiversity scientists celebrate nature’s variability, listing its beneficial services for society. Some of the functions it enables include flood regulation, carbon sequestration, pollination, and medicinal and nutritional plant provisioning. But beneficiaries are ‘community’, a word used to describe a passive recipient group, serviced uniformly by a forest or river. Community becomes an amalgamation of individuals, with otherwise different capacities to access and use services, individuals with different potentials in converting an ecosystem service or natural resource into valuable life pursuits.
Biodiversity folk need not look far for ways to understand well-being in these ways. They will find the necessary words in their own conceptual arsenal-variability (think species variety) and functioning (think leaf litter decomposition or soil stabilising).
And yet, human variation and functioning are central to Noble Laurette Amartya Sen’s idea of “capabilities,” a philosophy behind the Human Development approach. A critique of mainstream utilitarian welfare economics, it provides a new informational space for life quality assessment — ‘capabilities’ or freedoms and opportunities to pursue valuable things in life. Sen pitches this pursual in ‘being’ and ‘doing’ terms. These are human ‘functionings‘. His core point is to consider development as freedom. Or your capability and mine to lead the kind of lives we have reason to value.
For example, the state of being well nourished or educated or having the freedom to do organic cultivation. In these cases, functioning is the well-being achieved while capability is the freedom to function or achieve. A community, and its individuals, differ in their capabilities to convert income or ecosystem service into valuable functioning.
Take forest income or rights. In a country characterised by class, caste and gender inequities, converting forest rights and income, or a forest’s ecosystem service into valuable functioning is not an invariable given. Even if we assume the conversion, we need research that demonstrates this. A research question for consideration — what capabilities have forest rights or forest ecosystem services enabled among the Soligas of Karnataka’s Biligiri Rangan Hills (B.R. Hills) or the Baigas of Dindori, Madhya Pradesh? And if you compare their freedoms and functioning, what accounts for differences if any?
File photo of women-folks protecting the forest outside their village, Daluakandi under Astaranga block in Puri district. | Photo Credit: HANDOUT_E_MAIL
Restoration
Restoration is the active or passive regeneration of biodiversity in a degraded ecosystem. Restoration is also an expert and confined field, ridden with technicalities and metrics. Take, for instance, phrases like four approaches to restoration, six principles of restoration, or a step-by-step restoration guide. Further, success metrics include area restored, ecosystem services generated, and livelihoods enhanced. But an ecosystem service is no indicator of well-being if people vary in their abilities to access it and convert it into valuable interest like growing their crop of choice and using the income raised for city-based education.
Livelihoods, whose original and influential definition includes capabilities and equity, are reduced to income. But what use is income for women in a household if they cannot spend it to pursue patriarchy-defying pursuits? Also, do we not see that community participation itself in restoration activity can be a well-being indicator? The care work that women invest in restoring a forest, and the aesthetics of a green flourish, are also well-being metrics. To answer questions raised in PNAS, biodiversity’s links to well-being will unravel if we are awake to human variability and functioning.
The author is Lead, Ecosystems and Human Well-being Programme, ATREE, Bengaluru. All views are personal.
