Recently on Tuesday, the Lok Sabha nodded to a Bill that amends a few provisions of the Biological Diversity Act of 2002. The Biological Diversity (Amendment) Bill seeks to cater to the concerns of multiple central ministries, researchers, state governments, stakeholders, and industries, relating to the implementation of a law as old as 20 years, that is designed to safeguard the nation’s biological diversity, thereby ensuring its sustainable utility.
The aim of the amendments is to support Indian systems of medicine such as Ayurveda, and call for foreign investments in the protection and commercial use of the biological resources of India. It also aims to ease and streamline processes such that it gets pretty simple for one and all to adhere to provisions.
The biodiversity law: What is it and what is its use?
Before answering this question, one needs to first understand what biological diversity actually is. When we talk about biological diversity, we refer to not one but all forms of life, including plants, animals, and microbes, along with their gene pools and their ecosystems. The Act that came up in the year 2002 was actually formed to respond to the global requirement to conserve and safeguard biological resources that are actually under threat because of human actions.
It was later that the intensity of the damage came forward, especially through a 2019 report by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). This body is like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
The report presented a warning saying that around 1 million plant and animal species, out of 8 million in all were on the verge of extinction. Around 75 percent of the land surface of the Earth and 66 percent of the oceans were majorly altered, as per the report.
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However, attempts to safeguard biological diversity were not new. The attempts actually date back to a time much earlier. In the year 1994, many nations across the globe including India nodded to a Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). The CBD is actually an international framework agreement. The agreement was based on three things. The first provision was that the indiscriminate utilization of biological resources is to be stopped. The second provision was the sustainable utilization of such resources. Finally, the third utilization was communities and people supporting the protection and maintenance of such resources must be rewarded accordingly.
The Biological Diversity Act of 2002 was enacted by former Indian PM Atal Bihari Vajpayee with a view to accomplishing these three objectives. A National Biodiversity Authority was established. The body acted as a regulatory body for the Act.
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The need for amendments
In the past years, the seed sector, the system of medicine, the pharmaceutical industry, the research community, and other related industries have raised their concerns over a few provisions of the Act passed in 2002 that somehow put restrictions on their activities. It is these sectors that threw light on the need for modification of the law.
Additionally, many nations nodded to the Nagoya Protocol in the year 2010. This is an essential international agreement falling under the CBD, that carries an Access and Benefit Sharing framework.
As a part of this framework, the nations that are rich in biodiversity were required to give access to their biological resources to the ones wishing to make use of them for commercial and research purposes. In return, the agencies that used these resources were made to share the advantages they received due to their use among local communities. This framework worked not only at the international level but also at the domestic level. In the past few years, the government has tried hard to support traditional systems of medicine, as all of these traditional systems of medicine are based on biological resources. the amendments proposed to the law cater to all the concerns raised by such sectors that are directly affected by the law.
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Categories: Trends
Source: vcmp.edu.vn