With growing population pace of development and the destruction of nature in the last six decades, India o needs to come up with a planned program for the protection and conservation of the environment, opined renowned environmentalist and Board Member of the Society for Ecology Restoration in Asia Ramesh Venkataraman. A study on conservation forests, rivers, wetlands, villages and cities should be done and a policy should be chalked out he added.
The Department of Landscape Architecture and Center for Ecological Landscapes (CEL) at MKSSS’s Dr. Bhanuben Nanavati College of Architecture for Women (BNCA), organised a collaborative dialogue ‘Towards an Ecological Landscape (TEL-4)’ between experts, researchers, academicians and the professionals where they shared their insights on ecological restoration, its impact on biodiversity and the challenges faced.
Preserving ecosystems and restoring their degradation is the need of the hour and to achieve that everyone has to play their part. The scope and role of stakeholder community in ecological restoration projects will prove to be impactful in combating the various challenges faced in restoring degraded ecosystems and preventing mass extinction. The TEL-4 theme was intended on similar lines where the resourced persons presented their experiences of working on ecological restoration projects in various parts of State of Maharashtra & from across India.
Dr. Anurag Kasyap said that the fact that present decade (2020-2030), is being declared as the decade of Ecological restoration by UN, makes such deliberations all the more important to plan how we can shape the future of biodiversity.
Dr. Sharveya Dhongde, Head of Academics at BNCA said that the conference would help us chalk out a definitive path in this direction.
Day one of the program began with an introductory session by Dr. Swati Shahasrabudhe, BNCA where she gave a brief about the series of TEL dialogues held in 2015, 2017, 2019 and explained the theme of TEL – 4, 2022 which focused on the experiences, narratives and stakeholders’ perspectives from the ecological restoration aspect. The deliberations by various experts pointed out to the fact that public participation was the key to success of ecological restoration projects. About eight different projects and case studies were presented by various experts from across India. Apart from this , two experts presented the role of technology in ecological restoration .
Mr. Ramesh Venkatraman in his keynote presentation explained what exactly the term ‘Ecological Restoration’ means and how is it different from the other approaches that we are quite familiar with, like afforestation and reforestation. He said that the status of restoration in India is a relatively new discipline because looking at most of the projects happening on the ground, they are about 10 to 15 years old so we are quite young in terms of restoration as a discipline as compared to other countries globally. The number of projects that we can call as genuine restoration projects are quite few and the majority projects are small. There is a need for well planned, strategic, scaled up and integrated response to the degradation challenges as compared to the ad-hoc and small size response. We need the involvement, active support and engagement of multiple stakeholders. Saying this he mentioned a list of key stakeholders which included the government, scientific community, education system, restoration practitioners, indigenous communities, funding agencies and climate change managers and explained in detail what role each of these stakeholders play in bringing about successful ecological restoration.
These researchers and experts included Pravin Thete, a researcher of Baneri Bora, Natasha Zarine, who is working for Khamandi restoration in Aurangabad , Farhaad Contractor who transformed a neglected desert land of about 500 acres in to fertile land, Pradeep Chavan of Kalpavriksha, a research institute on Vanaspati in Bhimashankar area, has spread awarenss about Ranmeva (wild vegetables) among the youth in Bhimashankar , Environmentalist Kaustubh Pandharipande an expert on the revitalization of the grasslands in ‘Varhada’ in Maharashtra explained the process of community involvement, Architect and urban planner Biley Menon who has successfully set up the ‘Adyar Environmental Park’ project on a 350-acre landfill site in Tamil Nadu, Dr. Aparna Watwe, who elaborated on saving of Panchgani tableland near Mahabaleshwar, Vijay Dasmana, who played a pivotal role in setting up the ‘Aravali Biodiversity Park’.
Tanish Gangurde presented on Environmental Rehabilitation and Measuring Carbon Footprint in Clean Energy while Rohit Pansare Geographic Information System, Remote Sensing Technology with the help of Satellite and Environmental Rehabilitation.
Prof. Neha Adkar was the compeer for the event.
Pune Business 