T. Nanda Kumar, the ecologist and environmental scientist says community participation is key to the sustainable management of biodiversity and natural resources.

Marginalised sections and rural communities in developing countries are more vulnerable to the environmental uncertainties arising out of climate change. Sustainable development programmes should be designed to help them cope with these uncertainties, according to P.S. Ramakrishnan, noted ecologist and environmental scientist.

Mr. Ramakrishnan says community participation is key to the sustainable management of biodiversity and natural resources. “Land use changes, deforestation and depletion of biodiversity are the bane of developing countries like India. Globalisation policies have aggravated the crisis by impacting on food security. Resource management programmes should address socio cultural traditions and livelihood problems of the vulnerable sections. Government-sponsored programmes have failed to deliver because the top-down approach does not lend itself to this objective.”

As an ecologist, Mr. Ramakrishnan directs his research to the interphase area of linking ecological and social processes. “What is socially and culturally valued by the local community invariably has an ecological value too.”

He advocates the integration of modern and traditional knowledge systems to ensure community participation in natural resource management. “Traditional knowledge can provide the building block for development of local communities, but it has to be scientifically validated and returned to the stakeholder community.”

Mr. Ramakrishnan sees the need to build up a good bank of scientists with interdisciplinary approach. He laments that most environment science departments in the country lack this approach.

In the early 1970s, Mr. Ramakrishnan initiated an interdisciplinary analysis on the problem of shifting agriculture (Jhum) caused by the slash-and-burn farming practice followed in the North-Eastern States. He adopted an integrated approach linking the natural and social dimensions of the problem.

The community participatory research attracted attention for the socio-ecological system perspective linking sustainable management of natural resources with sustainable livelihood and development of traditional societies.

Mr. Ramakrishnan is critical of the biodiversity mapping programme taken up by various States. “Without community involvement, it becomes a routine affair. Protection of intellectual property rights becomes possible only if you can put meaning into traditional knowledge. Unfortunately, that is not being done.”

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