Title: Assessment of Medicinal and Aromatic Plant species (including collection, usage, demand, markets, price trends & life cycle) focusing on landscapes in Sikkim, with special reference to RETs
KeyWords: Biodiversity resources, particularly medicinal and aromatic plants, are usually harvested in an unorganized manner by the local communities to not only address health concerns, but also for sale as a key source of their livelihood
Year of Publication: 2021
ISSN No: NA
Author Name: Somashekhar B S and Abdul Kareem
Details:
INTRODUCTION
Biodiversity resources, particularly medicinal and aromatic plants, are usually harvested in an norganized manner by the local communities to not only address health concerns, but also for sale as a key source of their livelihood. However, this trade happens largely in an unorganized manner resulting in under-realization of the economic value at the grassroots, while delivering higher returns for intermediaries as we move upstream in the value chain.
With increasing demand, the intensity of harvesting/ collection from the wild increases and can result in degradation of the wild resource bases in the region. The assessment of availability, harvesting systems, corresponding sustainable methods of collection, and compliance of statutory provisions of Biological Diversity Act on Access and Benefit Sharing, therefore become critically important for optimizing the benefits to the local communities and to ensure adoption of concepts of sustainable harvesting and the consequent conservation.
The Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEF & CC), Government of India along with UNDP is implementing a new GEF funded project: SECURE Himalaya (Securing livelihoods, conservation, sustainable use and restoration of high range Himalayan ecosystems) in the states of Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand and Sikkim, which aims to support the Government of India to effectively promote sustainable land and forest management in alpine pastures and forests in high range Indian Himalayan ecosystems that secure sustainable livelihoods and community resilience and ensures conservation of globally significant biodiversity and threatened species.
The high range Himalayan ecosystem in India is of critical importance for the biodiversity and ecosystems of global significance that it harbors and forms an important life-support system for many remote and agro-pastoral communities that depend on it. Despite the immense biological, socio-cultural and hydrological values of the Himalayan ecosystems, these natural ecosystems are under severe threat from high dependence of local communities on natural resources, pressures from economic development, selective unsustainable removal of medicinal and aromatic plants, and the emerging threats of illegal wildlife trade and wildlife crime. To address these threats, the project SECURE Himalaya aims to demonstrate a matrix of best practices of conservation for scaling up and replicating in other landscapes nationally and globally.