Prakash Javadekar said India has increased forest and tree cover to 24.56% over the past decade.
New York / New Delhi:
Since time immemorial, India has had a culture of not only conserving and protecting nature, but also living in harmony with it, Environment, Forestry and Climate Change Minister Prakash Javadekar said on Thursday.
Speaking at the United Nations Biodiversity Summit, he said that “the emergence of COVID-19 has underscored the fact that unregulated exploitation of natural resources associated with unsustainable eating and consumption patterns lead to a system of destruction that sustains human life “.
“As enshrined in our Vedic scripts ‘Prakriti Rakshati Rakshita’, that is, if you protect nature, nature will protect you,” he added.
Prakash Javadekar said India has increased forest and tree cover to 24.56% over the past decade.
“Over the past decade, India has increased the combined forest and tree cover to 24.56 percent of the country’s total geographic area,” he said.
India has the highest number of tigers in the wild and that number has doubled before the 2022 deadline, the Union Minister said.
On August 15, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced two projects, Project Lion and Project Dolphin, to preserve the nation’s biodiversity.
He added that India aims to restore 26 million hectares of degraded and deforested land and achieve land degradation neutrality by 2030.
“India has operationalized an access and benefit-sharing system of the Convention on Biological Diversity through a national network of 250,000 biodiversity management committees across the country involving residents and 170,000 registers of the biodiversity of peoples for the documentation of biodiversity, ”he said.
The post-2020 global biodiversity framework that will be adopted at the 15th Conference of the Parties to the CBD in 2021 offers a good opportunity to strengthen efforts to conserve and protect nature, the minister said. Union.
“India has already played a leadership role in conserving biodiversity by organizing two conferences of the parties (COPs) in less than a year,” he said. “We organized the UNCCD COP 14 in September 2019 in New Delhi, followed by the Convention on Migratory Species (CMS) COP 13 in Gandhinagar in February 2020.”
Prakash Javadekar said India is championing the cause of “climate action” through conservation, a sustainable lifestyle and a green development model.
