THE ROLE OF WOMEN IN CONSERVING GENETIC DIVERSITY

Women have traditionally played an important role in managing the genetic diversity in their regions, harvesting carefully, and allowing regeneration so that the resource base is sustained over generations. In many Asian societies, field operations like ploughing and marketing are done by men, and the selection and storage of seed, planting and weeding in fields, by women. Women generally use their knowledge of natural and biological resources to satisfy multiple household needs. They breed well-adapted varieties and develop sophisticated farming systems using a range of crop varieties, to ensure food and nutrition for the family. Their access to and use of genetic resources is unhindered and they succeed in making effective use of them for food, fodder, medicine and other essential products.

The transformation of agriculture to meet the needs of a globalizing market economy is contributing to the steady erosion of the biological resources and knowledge systems controlled by women. The trend towards monocultures and cash crops in a high input, intensive agriculture system, to produce crops on contract or for urban and export markets, is impacting negatively on women’s role in domestic and local arenas. 

Communities often have well-defined gender roles in plant and seed selection and storage. Traditionally women in Asia often use a variety of indigenous plants, trees and animals, and they have a direct stake in conservation. The Neem tree, for example, is used as a bactericidal agent in agriculture, in the household for storing food and to prevent infections. Women tend to take a lead role in preserving and conserving croplands, forests and other natural resources for perpetual use. Men are more likely to be involved in converting these resources into cash. Women are also often the traditional caretakers of genetic and species diversity in agriculture. Their knowledge of growing conditions and nutritional characteristics of various species trains them in seed selection and plant breeding. In many societies, it is women who are mainly responsible for this, as well as for seed exchange and preservation of local bio diversity, often gathering fruits and medicinal plants from forests for immediate use or for sale at local markets.

The ‘Convention of Biological Diversity’ (CBD), which affirms the sovereign rights of nations over their bio resources, calls for conservation of bio diversity, sustainable use of its components, and fair and equitable sharing of benefits arising from the utilisation of genetic resources. The CBD makes reference in the Preamble to the central role of women in conserving bio diversity and knowledge of plant properties: “Recognizing also the vital role that women play in the conservation and sustainable use of biological diversity and affirming the need for the full participation of women at all levels of policy-making and implementation for biological diversity conservation”. ‘Agenda 21’, adopted at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, also stresses the need to strengthen women’s involvement in national ecosystem management and control of environmental degradation. 

Other international plans of action have highlighted the critical role of gender in genetic resources conservation and sustainable utilisation. The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) publication, ‘Gender – Key to Sustainability and Food Security’, states: “Rural women in developing countries hold the key to many of the planet’s agriculture systems for food production, seed selection, and protection of agro-bio diversity. Women using diverse wild and indigenous species often use home gardens as experimental plots.”

I came across a startling report about birds on the war front in Ukraine using thin fibre optic cables to build their nests.

These cables are used to control attack drones and the birds have found a use for it. It's tragic that a war torn region has so destroyed and disrupted nature that birds are not able to live in peace, build their nests with natural materials like leaves, barks and grasses. They have to make do with what is available.

On the other hand, the adaptability of these birds to their changed environment is inspiring, as is their creativity.

Nature is resilient as these birds show us. But there is a limit to this resilence. If you disrupt and destroy nature beyond a point, the resilience is broken.

Our climate crisis is a living example of this.

📍THE BITTER IRONY OF CLIMATE CHANGE

Climate change alters rainfall patterns and temperature regimes. This in turn influences local water balance and disturbs the optimal cultivation period for particular crops, known as the Length of Growing Period or LGP. According to climate forecasts, land with good LGP will decrease by over 51 million hectare worldwide.

Adequate LGP is required to ensure that medium to long duration crops can successfully grow to maturity. Some crop varieties mature quickly and are ready for use in a shorter period (short duration varieties). Others, especially most cereals, require a longer duration to mature. When the LGP in an agro climatic zone is long, a variety of crops from short duration to long duration can be cultivated there throughout the growing season. This means higher food production. When on the other hand, the LGP contracts, the growing season is shortened, fewer crops can be cultivated thus reducing food production.

Most climate models predict large increases in the LGP of today’s temperate and arctic regions. This means that temperate regions that are currently one crop zones (growing just one crop per year) will become two crop zones (growing two crops per year), resulting in a doubling of food production there.

On the other hand, almost half the production potential of tropical countries like India could be lost. The biggest blow to food production is expected to come from the loss of multiple cropping zones. The worst hit areas are predicted to be those where favorable weather allows farmers to take two to three crops in a year. These areas are predicted to turn into single crop zones, where only one crop can be taken in a year because the LGP will have shrunk or shifted In a perverse irony, the develop/ temperate countries will experience an increase in agriculture production as temperate regions get warmer. 

The regions which because of their industrialization and huge emissions of Greenhouse Gases (GHGs) are responsible for wrecking the climate will actually end up being its beneficiaries. On the other hand, today’s developing world in the tropics, which has not contributed to creating this climate hazard, will be its worst victim, and will suffer a loss in agriculture productivity, with serious consequences for food availability and hunger.

📍Who is saving and who is destroying the forest ?

A recent report has just told us that India can save its forests by winning the war on poverty. Indicating thereby that the poor exploit the forest recklessly to fulfil their needs. But is this really true? How come there are dense jungles where the Adivasi communities, hardly ranked as the “richest” on the economic scale, have been living for generations? And how is it that forests or even orchards near cities are hacked and cleared for projects like luxury housing or amusement parks?
 
Forest dwellers usually secure their livelihoods in sustainable ways and they treat their forests as their strongest allies, not their enemies. The concept of Sacred Groves in the North East shows us how these communities venerate their forests and trees. The Sarna of the Chotanagpur adivasis are groves of old Sal trees which are sacred to them, where they believe their village deities and spirits reside. Sacred Groves and Sarnas are inviolate. The forests are protected.
 
On the other hand, the township of Gurgaon (now Gurugram), part of the National Capital Region has been built on orchards, fields and pastures. No, it is not the poor who ravage the forests, it is the rich with their bottomless greed.
 
We are seeing how the lush, biodiversity rich Hasdeo forest is being butchered, heartless brutes treading over the weeping women holding on to the feet of the monsters who are vandalising their trees, their deities and gods, the spirits of their ancestors. The communities of Hasdeo are not destroying their forest, Adani and his henchmen are doing that.
 
So please stop the hypocrisy about winning the war on poverty to save forests. Stop spinning yarns about income generation activities that will be mired in corruption and never materialise. Instead, restrain the unbridled avarice of the super-rich honchos…and the forests will be saved.

The News - https://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/science/not-binary-india-can-save-its-forests-by-winning-the-war-on-poverty/article71100846.ece

 📍How Climate Change is Starving the Himalayan Herders

The pastoral communities of India (the herders who rear sheep, goats, cattle, camels as also yaks in our northern and hilly states) live a transhumance life, moving across regions with their animals, in search of pastures. Such a system allows grazed pastures to recover and regenerate while new pastures ensure their animals had sufficient food throughout the year.

The livelihood of the mountain pastoralists is based on a delicate seasonal migration: taking their herds high up into the mountain pastures (bugyals) in the summer, and bringing them down to the valleys in the winter.

But global warming is disrupting this ancient rhythm. As the Himalayan glaciers melt at an increasingly rapid pace and weather patterns become highly erratic, the vegetation cycles of these high-altitude pastures are changing. The grass is often not there when the herders arrive.

Their traditional knowledge tells them when to move their flocks, but climate change has erased the reliability of that knowledge. Without adequate grazing lands, the animals starve, and the traditional pastoralist economy collapses. 

Clearly, there is an urgent need to draft adaptation strategies for these high-altitude communities.

 

📍ARE DESIGNER BABIES DANGEROUS ? 

Tampering with the genetics of producing babies began with Dolly the sheep who became a genetic sensation in 1996. She was cloned by a process called somatic cell nuclear transfer. In this, scientists took a cell from an adult sheep and transferred its DNA into another sheep egg cell from which the nucleus was removed. This embryo grew up to be Dolly, showing for the first time that specialized cells from an adult body could be reprogrammed to create an entirely new organism. Since then scientists have cloned over 20 other mammal species, including cattle, horses, pigs and mice and later, even monkeys.

 

We have come a long way since Dolly, via stem cell therapy and research on human embryos . The latter is governed by the globally accepted 14-Day Rule which prohibits researchers from culturing or researching live human embryos in the lab past 14 days of development. This convention was breached in 2018 by a Chinese scientist Dr. He Jiankui who secretly edited the DNA of twin embryos to make them resistant to HIV. There was an international furore when this was discovered and it led to Dr. Jiankui’s imprisonment for violating medical ethics and regulations. 

 

I have a sense that the earlier scientific outrage seems to be weakening as genetic technologies develop further and the appeal of designer babies refuses to abate. 

The new gene-editing technologies like CRISPR-Cas9 have made it even easier to alter the DNA of human embryos and produce genetically modified babies or ‘designer babies’. It is feared that this prohibited line of research is now being done covertly in more than one lab.

The main scientific goal of creating designer babies is to halt the transmission of heritable diseases but there are already whispered demands to create an infant with certain characteristics that parents consider desirable. This would be the start of the slippery slope.

Apart from grave ethical concerns, the reason why frivolous genetic alteration of the embryo is proscribed is because DNA editing of human embryos often leads to unintentional or “off-target" mutations. This will result in a “cellular mosaic”, meaning not all cells will get altered as intended. These defective changes will be passed down to all future generations, so all descendants of this “designer person” will carry the defect of the cellular mosaic. And we have no idea what impacts this will have.

 

If designer babies and designer adults become a reality in substantial numbers, we can easily imagine that the genetic and physical integrity of homo sapiens will change. How likely is it that this will happen? Hard to say. Covenants and regulations can be/ have been broken as we have seen. And there are plenty of mavericks out there wanting to go out and plant their flag on something outrageous…and forbidden.

We have seen for some years now how climate change is not just altering the Himalayan landscape; it is changing the disease profile of the mountains too. 

Warmer winters, shrinking snowfall and changing rainfall patterns have changed the ecosystem so radically that vector borne diseases practically unknown at higher altitudes till now are becoming increasingly visible. Mosquitoes carrying malaria, dengue and chikungunya are now able to survive in the warmer higher altitudes where these diseases were once rare. 

👉 In Jammu & Kashmir, dengue cases almost doubled from 1,709 in 2021 to 3,381 in 2025, while suspected chikungunya cases surged from 7 to 773 during the same period. Himachal Pradesh, which reported no chikungunya cases in 2021, recorded over 200 cases in 2025.

This should be a wake-up call. Mountain communities are now confronting new types of diseases and local health systems do not necessarily have the experience to deal with such outbreaks. Climate adaptation can no longer be viewed solely through the lens of infrastructure or disaster preparedness. Public health systems in the Himalayan states must adapt by strengthening disease surveillance, expanding diagnostic capacity, training healthcare personnel and preparing for outbreaks of dengue, malaria and other climate-triggered diseases.

The challenge does not end there; climate change is also eroding biodiversity, traditional crops and resilient farming systems that have sustained mountain communities for generations. As I have said repeatedly, agrobiodiversity and indigenous knowledge are among our strongest tools for coping with a rapidly changing climate.

There is a clear message here: climate change is no longer a thing of the future. It is rewriting the region's health, agriculture and ecological challenges. Our adaptation policies will have to keep pace with the rate of climate turbulence.

 

The “rights of nature” is a new concept: that nature possesses fundamental rights, just as humans do. It derives from an old concept rooted in traditional societies that saw themselves as part of nature, not distinct from it. Ancient India, including people who lived at the time of the Rig Veda, were nature worshippers. The Rig Veda is said to have been compiled in the Bronze Age, between 3,000 to 4,000 years ago. The Rig Vedic communities revered several deities: personifications of the elements of nature like fire, water, sky and earth, and they treated the environment as a sacred whole. The chief deity was Agni (fire), and others like Indra (lightning/rain), Varuna (water) and Prithvi (earth). India’s ancient seers believed the universe was governed by a moral law: living in harmony with nature and maintaining its ecological balance was essential for fulfilling one’s “dharma”

Like ancient Indians, many other primeval people were nature worshippers too. These included the Shinto community in Japan, Celtic and Germanic tribes, Mayans and Aztec people, Native Americans and ancient Greeks and Romans. Nature held primacy in these civilisations. This changed in later years and far from being worshipped, Nature became a resource to be exploited for financial gain, with little regard for its survival and sanctity. As humans degraded nature and systematically destroyed it, the unpleasant and threatening manifestations of this destruction became evident today.

A hallmark of our era is destruction of ecosystems, disruption of biospheres, polluted rivers, biodiversity loss and species extinction. Instead of conserving Nature, that has nurtured us for millennia, we appear hell-bent on destroying it. We have already breached seven of nine critical planetary boundaries and pushed the planet into uncharted territory: ecosystems are devastated and the weather has become completely unstable. Freshwater in all forms, like surface water, groundwater, even soil moisture, is being depleted at unsustainable rates due to overexploitation. In this backdrop of an utterly ravaged nature, the concept of the Rights of Nature took shape as an attempt to salvage what one could to ensure the continued survival of the human race. History There is a Rights of Nature movement in many nations seeking systemic change in how we treat nature. This movement is trying to develop fresh concepts in the legal system to make it work for the protection of the environment instead of enabling the rights of certain people to exploit the environment. Most Rights of Nature legal precedent is very recent, having emerged in just the last few years as a direct response to the failure of modern environmental law to adequately address the escalating ecological crisis.

The Rights of Nature approach attempts a transformation in the way the status of nature is upheld in society. It says Nature possesses its own rights and can’t be treated merely as human property. Nature’s rights include the right to exist and to thrive, and most important, the right to restoration. Since the Rights of Nature accords it legal standing, it can be directly defended in a court of law. Ultimately, for these rights to be successfully implemented, humans must act as guardians or stewards of the natural world. Rivers have understandably become a key focus in the Rights of Nature movement, since river systems are under extreme pressure everywhere. Many of the world’s rivers suffer from extreme over-exploitation, bringing about fundamental changes in riverine ecosystems, habitats and watersheds. With its established history of worshipping nature, especially its rivers, India could have led the global trend to demand the Rights of Nature by personal example and enlightened legislation. But it failed to do so because of a Supreme Court intervention in a pioneering attempt by the Uttarakhand high court. 

The Uttarakhand case: In 2014, a Haridwar resident, Mohammad Salim, filed a PIL on illegal construction, mining, and stone-crushing on the banks of the Ganga. In response, the Uttarakhand high court ruled in 2017 that rivers were in danger of losing their existence and extended to them “all corresponding rights, duties, and liabilities of a living person”. This led to declaring the Ganga and Yamuna rivers as “Living Legal Entities”. 

This historic legal breakthrough to establish that Nature had rights was, however, short-lived. In 2017 the Supreme Court stayed the high court order, in a sense saying that India’s two most important rivers, the Ganga and the Yamuna, cannot be viewed as “Living Entities”. The stay came in response to an appeal by the Uttarakhand government that making the state solely accountable for the upkeep of rivers spanning multiple states was impractical and required Central government intervention. This put paid to a far-sighted legal ruling that could have gone a long way to uphold the rights of rivers and to protect them from pollution and degradation. 

While the India case lies stalled, other countries have moved forward to provide legal protection to rivers by granting them legal personhood or inherent rights. Ecuador in 2008 became the first country to formally embed the Rights of Nature, including rivers and ecosystems, into its constitution, allowing citizens to legally defend the environment. New Zealand had enacted legislation in 2014 granting the Whanganui River legal personhood, giving it all the rights, duties, and liabilities of a legal person. In Colombia, the Atrato River was recognised as a legal entity in 2016, possessing rights to protection, conservation, maintenance and restoration. In a historic ruling in 2019, the Supreme Court of Bangladesh recognised all rivers in the country as legal persons and appointed the National River Conservation Commission as their legal guardian. Finally, in Canada, the Innu Council of Ekuanitshit and the regional municipality passed resolutions in 2021 giving the Magpie River legal personhood, granting it rights to flow and be free from pollution. 

https://www.asianage.com/opinion/columnists/it-might-be-time-to-grant-legal-rights-to-nature-1969115

 📌 WORLD ENVIRONMENT DAY 2026: WHAT EXACTLY ARE WE CELEBRATING?

Today is WorldEnvironmentDay. A day for speeches, hashtags, photo-ops with saplings, solemn pledges and carefully crafted messages about our love for nature.

But forgive me for asking - what exactly are we celebrating?

The environment that we are systematically destroying? The forests we are cutting down for mining? The rivers we are poisoning with industrial waste and sewage? The mountains we are blasting in the name of infrastructure development? The biodiversity we are driving to extinction? Or the tribal communities we are uprooting from lands they have protected for

generations?

Nothing captures the hypocrisy of this annual ritual better than what is happening in the Hasdeo Forests of Chhattisgarh, one of India’s richest forest ecosystems, often called the 'Lungs of Central India'.

I’m not against generating energy or against development, but the question is why the easiest solution always seems to be sacrificing forests, biodiversity and indigenous rights.

Year after year, governments assure us that environmental protection is a priority. Prime Ministers and assorted others speak passionately about climate change, sustainability and green growth. Yet on the ground, forests continue to disappear under excavators and mining clearances.

World Environment Day has increasingly become an exercise in collective self-congratulation and is reduced to mere tokenism that allows governments, corporations and even citizens to feel virtuous for a day while the destruction continues uninterrupted for the remaining 364.

For decades, the scientists, environmentalists, and everyone concerned have been warning that the climate crisis is no longer a future threat. It has already entered our homes: the heatwaves, floods, droughts, crop failures and disappearing water sources are real-life

manifestations.

I am pained to say that while leaders plant ceremonial saplings and deliver speeches on sustainability, an estimated 5 lac trees are proposed to be slaughtered in Hasdeo forests; over 15000 Adivasi families will be impacted, whose lives depend on these forests for their livelihoods, for their very survival. Let that sink in. If this is environmental protection, what does environmental destruction look like?

Senior officials of the Himachal forest department have announced that they plan to develop 136 sites in the forest area for ecotourism. The main objective, they say, is to decongest overcrowded city tourist destinations and bring the tourists closer to nature.

This ecotourism project will offer activities like trekking, camping, rock climbing, and motor biking as well as food vans offering local cuisine. At the same time, this project also aims to create income opportunities for rural youth with jobs like travel guides and cooks and other sundry ad hoc occupations.

I would ask the Himachal Forest Department to see the consequences of inviting unbridled tourism. In this case, religious tourism, in the neighbouring state of Uttarakhand, has led to thirty km long traffic jams going up to the holy site of Kedarnath, so-called 'pilgrims' tanking up on alcohol in the holy town, and lots of incidents of unruly behaviour.

Or take a look at the recently minted Dham at Kainchi in Almora. Choked traffic along all mountain roads, causing endless misery to local residents, drunk policemen misbehaving with local women, discarded food and plastic litter strewn along kilometres of roads going up to Kainchi and down again.

Is this the tourism you had in mind? You want to earn revenue and wreck your state? Your call.

The vandals going up as tourists will be the same.

https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/himachal/to-promote-ecotourism-himachal-forest-dept-to-lease-out-51-of-136-identified-sites-soon/amp/?utm=relatedarticles

 

This year’s heat alarm went off with the mercury touching 48.2°C in Banda in the Bundelkhand region of Uttar Pradesh. This weather record must be treated as a shrill warning of dire things to come if we even now refuse to acknowledge that the consequences of global warning are going to border on catastrophic. And we better put adaptation strategies in place NOW. 

Schools shutting at 10 a.m., deserted streets, collapsing livelihoods, and the poor struggling to survive outdoors are no longer isolated episodes. They are signs of the widespread climate catastrophe that our country has entered without preparation, without safeguards, and worst of all, without seriousness. The May 2026 report on Banda’s extraordinary heatwave wasn’t just a weather report of a town; it is the evidence of decades of ecological neglect.

Bundelkhand has always been ecologically fragile, but decades of environmental degradation have pushed the region towards collapse. Deforestation, shrinking water bodies, relentless groundwater extraction, destruction of traditional tanks and ponds, declining tree cover and unsustainable agricultural practices have combined with global warming to create lethal conditions. Concrete expansion without ecological planning has intensified local heat islands. Rivers are drying earlier, soils are losing moisture-retaining capacity, and farming systems have become increasingly vulnerable. Heatwaves that were once occasional are now prolonged, harsher and more frequent.

This is exactly how climate change enters and affects human life; not dramatically in a single moment, but steadily, silently and then suddenly all at once. For years, climate change remained confined to policy seminars, global summits and bureaucratic reports. It was discussed in air-conditioned conference halls as if it were a distant future concern. That illusion no longer survives. Climate change is now inside our homes, affecting our health, livelihoods, food systems and daily survival. The poor laborer working outdoors, the farmer watching crops shrivel, the child unable to attend school because of unbearable heat, the elderly struggling through sleepless nights without cooling, are the real faces of global warming.

Extreme heat is not just uncomfortable, it is deadly. It accelerates water scarcity, destroys crops, reduces labour productivity, worsens malnutrition, and increases disease burdens. Urban centres become furnaces because trees have disappeared and wetlands have been buried under the concrete of development projects. Rural distress intensifies as rainfall becomes erratic and farming turns uncertain. Climate change is now directly linked to food insecurity, indebtedness and migration.

The science behind this crisis has been understood for years. What has been missing is political urgency and the failure to acknowledge ecological wisdom. Sustained work by scientists over decades has tried to draw attention to the fact that tampering with the ecological foundations of food and livelihood security will spell disaster. Repeated warnings were issued about the dangers of destroying biodiversity, replacing resilient local farming systems with monocultures, eroding traditional seed diversity and neglecting community- based natural resource management. We have known since long that bio resources and genetic diversity are not academic concepts but survival tools in an age of climatic uncertainty. But we have not acted.

Despite plenty of evidence that climate shocks would hit the poor the hardest because their survival is directly tied to natural resources — land, forests, water and biodiversity, development policies continued to privilege short-term gains over ecological stability. Rivers were treated as engineering projects, forests as real estate, and agriculture as an industrial input-output exercise divorced from nature.

And here we see the results unfolding before our eyes. Banda is not an exception, it is a warning about other events that are underway. Similar conditions are emerging across large parts of India; from Himalayan regions witnessing glacial instability to coastal belts facing cyclones and salinity intrusion; from drought-prone interiors to cities collapsing under extreme heat. We see that unabated construction is rampant in mountain states like

Himachal and Uttarakhand despite nature’s constant warnings. The climate crisis has moved from planning and prediction to lived reality today. The tragedy is that even now, responses remain fragmented and cosmetic. Responses are devoid of any ecological understanding We have plantation drives with abysmal survival rates of what was planted, infrastructure expansion without environmental safeguards, and climate rhetoric devoid of meaningful applicability. This will will not address the magnitude of the crisis we are facing. What is needed is a fundamental shift in planning the future, helping forests to regenerate, biodiversity conservation , ecological restoration, water security and climate-resilient agriculture rooted in local knowledge systems, these are the things we need.

Unfortunately, it appears that those responsible for shaping policy are still not listening with the seriousness the crisis demands. Nature’s warning signals have become impossible to ignore. The question is whether society and governments will act before ecological breakdown becomes irreversible. Banda’s unbearable heat is not just a temperature statistic; it is the sound of an ecological alarm bell ringing across India. What is truly heart breaking is that those least responsible for the crisis are paying the heaviest price.

https://open.substack.com/pub/sumansahai/p/48-degrees-c-in-banda-up-is-a-warning?r=6oq097&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web