India Launches Guide to Protect Grasslands and Natural Ecosystems

India has launched its first comprehensive guide on grasslands and Other Open Natural Ecosystems (ONEs), highlighting the ecological, biodiversity and socio-economic importance of these often-overlooked landscapes. The guide was unveiled at UNCCD COP17 in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, strengthening India's contribution to global efforts on land conservation and sustainable ecosystem management.

The initiative, led by India's Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, focuses on ecosystems such as grasslands, savannas, scrublands, deserts and ravine landscapes. These areas support diverse wildlife, provide livelihoods for local communities and play an important role in maintaining ecological balance.

The guide aims to improve understanding of these ecosystems and encourage their conservation, restoration and sustainable management. It also seeks to address the tendency to view open natural landscapes as degraded or unproductive land, emphasizing instead their role in biodiversity conservation and ecosystem services.

By bringing greater attention to grasslands and other open ecosystems, the initiative represents a significant step toward strengthening India's nature conservation and sustainable land-management efforts while contributing to international discussions on combating land degradation, desertification and biodiversity loss.

Grasslands, savannas, scrublands, deserts and ravine landscapes - collectively "Other Open Natural Ecosystems" - have historically been under-recognised in Indian conservation policy compared to forests and wetlands. Yet these ecosystems support substantial biodiversity, particularly bird populations, ungulates and specialist arid-land species, while providing livelihoods for pastoralist and agro-pastoralist communities.

The reframing away from viewing open landscapes as "degraded" or "unproductive" is analytically important. Many ONE ecosystems have been converted to plantation forestry or agriculture based on this misclassification, delivering neither ecological nor economic outcomes commensurate with the underlying land value. Better recognition supports more accurate land-use planning.

For agricultural, mining and infrastructure operators with landscape-scale exposure in India, financial institutions supporting nature-linked investment and their community partners, Cognitud's nature-based solutions, impact assessment and sustainability due diligence teams help clients evaluate biodiversity-linked risk and opportunity across ONE ecosystems, structure conservation-partnership programmes aligned with the new guide framework, and prepare disclosures aligned with TNFD, SBTN and jurisdictional biodiversity frameworks.