India spells out finance needs for biodiversity, conservation #IndiaFinance

Cesar Luena, Member of the European Parliament, Chair of the delegation COP16 of the EP Committee on Environment, Public Health and Food Safety.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

India expects to spend around ₹81,664 crore from 2025-30 (FY) on biodiversity and conservation. From 2018-22 (FY), India spent ₹32,207 crore and to meet the higher financing requirements would require funds from sources beyond routine government expenditure, the country stated in its updated submission at the ongoing 16th edition of Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) in Colombia (COP-16).

The expenditure from 2018-2022 was purely that expended by the Centre as allocations to various Ministries or statutory bodies for the conservation and biodiversity-linked programmes.

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Indian officials at the conference said international finance would be necessary to meet these goals. “I would like to mention that it is necessary to provide means of implementation, including financial resources, as laid down in target 19 of the KMGBF as well as from DSI, for implementation of the NBSAP,” Kirti Vardhan Singh, Minister of State (Environment), said in a statement at the convention.

The two-week convention is expected to conclude on November 1 (Colombia). “Lot of ground needs to be covered in providing easily accessible means of implementation, i.e. financial resources, technology and capacity building needs with the requisite speed, scope and scale.”

The Kunming Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (KMGBF) refers to biodiversity goals previously agreed upon by countries to reverse and stop biodiversity loss by 2030. The road to achieving this is by countries agreeing to 23 targets identified as part of these goals.

The DSI refers to Digital Sequence Information, and is one of the agreements currently being debated upon by countries in Colombia and deals with equitably sharing the benefits from uploading genetic data of organisms in global databases.