The National Biodiversity Authority, which regulates and conserves India’s biological resources, is looking to expand Other Effective Area-based Conservation Measures (OECMs) – geographic areas that are not legally protected but that also host biodiversity – as a strategy to meet its newly updated biodiversity goals.

In October 2024, India officially committed to the “effective” conservation of 30% of the country’s terrestrial, inland water, coastal and marine areas by 2030, when it submitted its updated Biodiversity Plan and targets to the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (UNCBD). India is hoping to make progress on this goal by recognising more OECMs across the country, said C. Achalender Reddy, chairman of the National Biodiversity Authority (NBA).

“These are areas that are not bound by wildlife and forest laws. The management of these areas has to be evolved differently. Recognising them as OECMs is how we can expand these conservation areas,” Reddy told Mongabay India.

In 2022, India collaborated with the United Nations Development Programme to create a compendium of 14 OECMs in India. Achieving the “30 by 30” goal, as it has been dubbed, will mean not only identifying more OECMs, but also better defining what the qualities of OECMs are, said Reddy. “The compendium was a good start, but it’s not enough. We have identified a few of these OECMs, but state governments also need to be taken into confidence so they too recognise them administratively,” Reddy said.

The NBA has constituted a 22-member committee to devise a more comprehensive approach to identifying and declaring OECMs and delineating their management. Key to this process is the inclusion of local communities involved in biodiversity use and management, experts say.

India’s own commitment to the “30 by 30” goal was drawn from the Global Biodiversity Framework. The Framework, adopted in 2022, is a global agreement under the UNCBD with 23 action-oriented targets, including the conservation of 30% of the world’s terrestrial, inland water, and coastal and marine areas by 2030.

Area-based approach

In its 2022 compendium, guidelines for identifying OECMs said they must fulfil four mandatory criteria: The area should not be a Protected Area; the area should be managed or governed in some way; it should be effective at delivering sustained outcomes for the in-situ biodiversity conservation; and that it should provide ecosystem functions and services.

The guidelines suggested eight types of terrestrial areas for consideration, including biodiversity parks, industrial estates for conservation, and individual green lands. It also suggested five types of water bodies, such as riverine and agricultural water bodies, and two types of marine areas.

“Protected Areas have typically privileged certain types of ecosystems, like forests, or charismatic species. OECMs can potentially offer a different model for conservation, bringing attention to a diversity of ecosystems and alternative forms of management and governance,” said Manan Bhan, a Fellow in Residence at the Ashoka Trust for research in Ecology and the Environment. Protected Areas under the Wildlife Protection Act and the Indian Forest Act typically impose restrictions on access to forests and non-forest activity within these areas. OECMs, on the other hand, can recognise the role communities play in conservation and the sustainable use of natural resources.

Bhan, along with five other researchers, argued in a research paper published last year that OECMs should be ecologically representative and include a diversity of habitats. This includes recognising the conservation value of open ecosystems, such as grasslands, and not dismissing them as “wastelands.”

“Strategic conservation needs to move from a species-centric approach to area-based management, aspiring to connect diverse ecosystems,” the research paper says.

Apart from taking an area-based management approach, declaring and managing OECMs may also need to contend with other challenges, the paper says, such as ensuring they don’t “come at the cost of unreasonable access restrictions or undemocratic changes,” for dependent communities. It also recommends collectively arriving at “transparent legal frameworks regulating the management of these areas and the enjoyment of shared benefits, if any.”

Locating OECMs

A 2023 study by researchers from some of India’s leading conservation groups found that most priority conservation areas fell outside Protected Areas, demonstrating the potential for OECMs. They, too, argue that OECMs should have an area-based approach to management. “Traditional PAs, which typify a land-sparing approach to conservation, are mostly focused on forested habitats in the country. A substantially large proportion of biodiversity continues to inhabit unprotected, human-use landscapes, warranting a land-sharing approach,” the researchers said.

The researchers, from institutions including the National Centre for Biological Science and Wildlife Conservation Society-India, looked at three key indicators to identify priority conservation areas: those that were representative of important and natural habitats, those responsible for the provision of key ecosystem services, (water and carbon absorption), and those that are important from the perspective of threatened species diversity and turnover. They also included open grasslands, savannas, hot and cold deserts, ravines, rocky boulders and escarpments in their analysis.

The paper found 169 districts delivering on all three criteria at an optimum level – many of them connected landscapes falling in the central and eastern states of Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, and Odisha. Other high priority districts are also found in the forested state of Arunachal Pradesh and the desert regions of Gujarat.

“Areas ranked high for habitat and biodiversity, but low in terms of ecosystem services represent some locations in the arid/semi-arid dry zones of western India, the cold deserts of the Trans-Himalayas and parts of the Terai grasslands along the India/Nepal border,” says the paper, adding that in some places, areas ranked high for ecosystem services in water and carbon did not necessarily rank highly in biodiversity and habitat indicators.

Some of the areas support a high population and overlap with the NITI Aayog’s “aspirational districts” – impoverished areas that are the target of the government schemes for improvements in standard of living. Models such as payment for ecosystem services can support both conservation and livelihood objectives, the researchers say. “These localised efforts and interventions need to be synergistically integrated into district- and state-level plans to ensure tangible impacts,” says the paper.

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