What Is A People’s Biodiversity Register?

In April 2024, the members of Bengaluru’s Biodiversity Management Committee (BMC) decided to record a woodland near Manyata Tech Park in the city’s People’s Biodiversity Register (PBR). Located in the city centre, this half-acre land is thought to be more than a century old. It hosts a plethora of biodiversity, with more than 20 species of trees and many species of birds.

With the city expanding and with unplanned urbanisation, documentation of ecologically rich spaces in the PBR is a step towards conservation and benefit sharing of traditional knowledge.

What is a People’s Biodiversity Register?

Mandated under the Biological Diversity (BD) Act, 2002, the People’s Biodiversity Register (PBR) is a repository of flora and fauna species, local livelihoods and traditional knowledge of utilising medicinal herbs and plants. It is an informal inventory of information, a locally maintained database and a means to protect intellectual property rights.

Even before it was mandated under the law, citizen scientists, NGOs and scientists began documenting biodiversity across India. The exercise, however, was more formalised after the Biological Diversity Act came into effect.

The PBR is a document that contains comprehensive information on locally available bio-resources, including the landscape and demography of a particular area, according to the National Biodiversity Authority (NBA), which is a statutory body established to carry out the provisions of the Biodiversity Act. The knowledge of local communities is at the heart of the PBR, in which local biodiversity is documented by the members of a BMC, students and teachers from educational institutions, volunteers from NGOs and interested citizens. The NBA at the centre, state biodiversity boards at the state level and Biodiversity Management Committees (BMCs) at the local government level, undertake training of these groups for the documentation.

Local communities prepare

BMCs consist of a chairperson and not more than six persons (naturalists, environmentalists or conservationists) nominated by the local body, of whom not less than one third should be women and not less than 18% should belong to the Scheduled Castes/Scheduled Tribes.

India accounts for eight percent of total global biodiversity, with an estimated 49,000 species of plants, of which 4,900 are endemic. At least 10% of India’s recorded wild flora and possibly more of its wild fauna are on the list of threatened species, according to a 2014 study by the CSIR-National Environmental Engineering Research Institute, Nagpur. The PBR acts as a repository to support the conservation of species and compare the current habitat with a previous one, thus providing an estimate of habitat loss.

How has PBR raised awareness of biodiversity?

The objective of the PBR, beyond conservation of biological diversity, is sustainable use of its components and equitable sharing of the benefits from the use of biological resources and knowledge. The documentation helps in sustainable resources management and also supports claims of local ownership and knowledge of biodiversity.

By documenting indigenous knowledge PBRs also prevent attempts to ignore or erase such knowledge. Illustrating an example, Jigar Solanki, a PhD student and a volunteer who contributed to PBRs for two villages in Maharashtra’s Pune district said, “For centuries, Indians have been using turmeric for healing wounds. Foreign companies claimed to have discovered its medicinal benefits and monetised turmeric. If turmeric and its benefits were documented in a PBR, the concerned community or India would perhaps have the rights to that knowledge.”

While the key objective of the BD Act is to safeguard traditional knowledge and prevent biopiracy, poor documentation is a challenge. “When the PBR itself is hurriedly documented, how can you establish rights?” remarked Sangita Mitra, who was a consultant to the NBA, adding that many Indian states followed the wrong formats and documented PBR in less than six months only to adhere to the NGT’s direction.

In Udupi’s Mala village, the residents had not realised the total value of non-timber forest produce being collected annually from their village was half a million rupees. Realisation of this large volume triggered an interest in sustainable use through mechanisms such as establishment of a joint forest management committee, wrote Madhav Gadgil, who laid the foundation for PBR in the 1990s.

In Bengaluru, besides a plethora of civic initiatives for restoration, the biodiversity of Bengaluru’s Madiwala lake was also recorded in the PBR a year ago. “Home to several native tree species, the lake is recorded as a potential conservation site in the PBR. It definitely played a role in sparking citizen interest in conserving the water body,” said Akshay Heblikar, Director of EcoWatch India and one of the members of Bengaluru’s BMC.

How can PBR be employed to uplift economies?

Considering its potential, the PBR could be used as a base document in the legal arena as evidence of prior knowledge and in the upliftment of indigenous people who possess traditional knowledge. However, this idea largely remains theoretical, said R.J. Ranjit Daniels, who was one of the experts to have prepared the methodology in the early 1990s. “There is not a single instance in India where PBR was used as an authentic document to fight against biopiracy and intellectual property.”

In Tamil Nadu’s Maduranthakam, a group of medicinal experts have been collecting common nettle, a medicinal plant that is used in siddha medicine to treat arthritis. “Local residents also shared their knowledge about the plant with the experts. They got no monetary benefit for possessing the resource and knowledge. In fact, they are not even aware that they can benefit economically,” said a botanist who wishes to remain anonymous.

PBR mandates a portion of profits to be shared with the traditional knowledge holders through Access and Benefit Sharing (ABS). As per the Guidelines on Access to Biological Resources and Associated Knowledge and Benefits Sharing Regulations, 2014, released by MoEFCC, any person who intends to have access to biological resources harvested by Joint Forest Management Committee (JFMC)/ Forest dweller/ Tribal cultivator/ Gram Sabha, shall apply to the NBA or to the State Biodiversity Board (SBB). Any of these agencies shall enter into a benefit sharing agreement with the applicant for commercial utilisation.

In 2018 the NBA took an initiative of writing to the biopharmaceutical companies to get into the access and benefit sharing with the Irula Snake Catchers Industrial Cooperative Society that extracts snake venom. A report from the Centre for Science and Environment mentioned that “only one company had agreed to pay, but even that promise remained unfulfilled.”

India is one of the few countries that had legislated a framework to deal with ABS in 2002. However, the implementation experience of ABS has been uneven and complex in India, writes former NBA chairperson, Balakrishna Pisupati, in a 2015 paper.

In 2023 India amended the BD act granting exemption to AYUSH practitioners and traditional knowledge holders from paying Access and Benefit Sharing (ABS).

What are the gaps in implementing PBR for conservation?

Lack of funding, low awareness at various levels and the lethargic attitude of the nodal agencies are the major gaps in implementing PBR for conservation.

Ashwini Kumar Choubey, former Minister of Consumer Affairs, Food and Public Distribution and Environment, Forest and Climate Change, in the national campaign for updation and verification of PBR in Goa in May 2023, informed that a total of 2,67,608 People’s Biodiversity Registers (PBR) have been prepared in the country with Andhra Pradesh topping the states. However, only 11,951 of them have been verified. Many of the PBRs are also not regularly updated. Bengaluru, for example, created a PBR in 2009 and has not updated it ever since.

“None of the nodal agencies – forest department or the state biodiversity boards have the expertise to verify the documented PBRs. After the National Green Tribunal (NGT) mandated completion of the registers by 2020, every state submitted thousands of them. However, it remains a tremendous task to cross verify them,” said Rahul Mungikar, Member, Expert Committee of NBA.

“We proposed digitalisation for easy search and cross verification. But the board has not reached that level of technical expertise due to shortage of funds,” Mungikar added.

Apart from the benefit sharing payable for knowledge holders, the BMCs should also collect fees from industries for using biological resources, as per the provisions of the BD Act (chapter 10). However, most BMCs are not even aware of the provision, said a BMC member, seeking anonymity.  “In Bengaluru alone, at least 15 companies should pay fees for using the information from PBR. But it has not been done yet,” the member said.

On the field, volunteers who record information on biodiversity from the locals expressed a huge disconnect and lack of trust. “To overcome that, we conduct street plays in the village about the exercise to help them understand what PBR is,” said Solanki.

Implementation of the BD Act requires human resource, institutional, and financial capacities that still need to be strengthened along with much needed increase in awareness of the public at local level in order to make the Act relevant and useful for conservation and development, wrote K. Venkataraman, in his research in 2008.  One of the salient features of the act is to protect the biological resources of the country. Fifteen years later, the problem remains the same, diluting the country’s important environmental law.

(Published under Creative Commons  from Mongabay-India. Read the original article here)