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Please describe to me about the current issue regarding Western Ghats and how we can protect it. Also list some measures to protect the environment.

The Western Ghats form the most important watershed divide in Peninsular India. All the major rivers in India south of Narmada originate from this north-south hill chain parallel to and close to the Western coast of India. By decidedly influencing the weather and the climate, particularly rainfall during the monsoons through orographic effect, all the river runoff in the southern part of India is controlled by the Western Ghats. Thus agriculture in the States of Maharashtra, Goa, Karnataka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu are crucially regulated by the Western Ghats. It is the major source for hydel power in these States.

The Western Ghats harbour the most extensive tropical forests in the Indian Peninsula in the States of Kerala, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. Geological stability over a long period of time, proximity to the equator, high rainfall and biogeographic antecedence have contributed to the tropical moist forests in the Western Ghats being endowed with exceptional biodiversity, ecosystem diversity and endemism. It is a refugia for ancient tropical flora and fauna.
The most important ecological damage inflicted upon the Western Ghats is deforestation. Within the past one century more than 50 percent of the forest vegetation of this tract has been lost. The remaining forests are extremely fragmented and most of the fragments are not viable ecologically for any length of time. Climax plant communities or benchmark ecosystems occupy only a tiny fraction of the area, less than 10 percent, and even these are getting rapidly degraded due to inadequate buffering and protection.

Rapid landuse changes and unsound resource management practices have undermined the viability and productivity of the entire agricultural landscape, tribal, non-tribal food crops as well as plantation crops.

The ‘traditional’ plantation crop areas i.e. tea, coffee, cardamom and pepper which have occupied all the accessible and potentially manageable areas since the late 19th century are in a state of agricultural collapse. It is not only an ecological crisis but also a major economic and socio-political crisis which is adversely affecting the State’s economy and the lives of millions of plantation labour. These plantations located mostly between 600m and 2000m had originally destroyed the best evergreen forests and currently for survival these stranded labour population is coming to depend upon the remaining natural forests.

What is Needed

A holistic clearer picture of the ground reality of the Western Ghats.
Consolidated technical as well as non-technical information on this tract could help people understand the ecological identity and the current status of this vital part of our country. Such a primer is needed for the decision maker, planner, researcher and more so for the lay public.

An analytical documentation of what are identified as the major environmental issues of the Western Ghats.
The issues have to be dissected down to their root causative factors to bring out the interconnections. Issues connected with deforestation, water resource use, changes in agricultural land use, tribal development, eco-tourism and so on have wider ramifications. At present we do not understand how these are interconnected geographically spatially as dovetailing into each other. Nor do we understand how economically, politically or sociologically they are parts of the same developmental notion. We have very little understanding of how ecologically they are influencing the same processes or are influenced by them. The current disarticulated perspective generates only a very inadequate comprehension of what is really confronting us. Automatically this results in a very inadequate corrective effort. We need a much clearer historical time line documentation of human interventions in the Western Ghats at least during the recent couple of centuries.
A two-year intensive survey of the Ghats in the Kerala part of South India. The residual ecosystems and the biotic communities are in the more inaccessible parts of the hills and fieldwork in these regions are possible only during part of the year. The area to be covered extends over approximately 12,000sq.km. of land under various categories of land use practices ranging from untouched wilderness to extensive cash crop plantations or even totally degraded rocky waste. The study is simultaneously a mapping documentation exercise, yet the findings are meant to be immediately injected into various circuits of public and official activities for protective action. Monetary support is needed for the field travel and the urgently required equipment are a GPS and a digital camera.
Conservation

Around 9 percent of the Western Ghats is protected, within 20 National Parks and 68 Sanctuaries . In addition, the Indian Forest Conservation Act, enacted in 1980, resulted in the cessation of all legal logging operations in the Western Ghats in the mid-1980s . While this offers the biodiversity of the Western Ghats some protection, it is clear that, as the human population pressure increases, further conservation measures are required.

Currently, many of the critical habitats within the Western Ghats, such as lowland dipterocarp-dominated evergreen forests and Myristica swamps, are not adequately represented in protected areas . Identifying, and subsequently conserving, key areas of biodiversity within the Ghats will help ensure that more of its flora and fauna are protected. India’s National Wildlife Action Plan 2002-2016 focuses on strengthening and enhancing this protected area network, and recognises the importance of local community participation in protected area management. It also addresses the need for ‘conservation corridors’, to connect protected areas and allow the movement of wide ranging species such as the Asian elephant (Elephas maximus), tiger (Panthera tigris), and dhole (Cuon alpinus)etc.


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