Knowledge Nugget | India’s first guide to grasslands: Why it matters

2. It highlights the rich diversity, ecological significance, and socio-economic importance of India’s grasslands and other open natural ecosystems.

3. It brings together information on major ONEs across India, covering their geographical settings, ecological characteristics, biodiversity, and the communities and tribes associated with them. It also contains sections on pastoralism, fire ecology, and carbon sequestration.

4. The minister for environment, forest, and climate change, Bhupender Yadav, described the guide as an important step towards recognizing India’s open natural ecosystems and stressed the need for their science-based conservation alongside forests.

5. Notably, India’s ONEs range from Himalayan and Terai grasslands to the Thar and Banni landscapes, rocky plateaus, ravines, scrublands, Deccan savannas, coastal ecosystems, and desert landscapes.

6. The Guide will serve as a valuable resource for policymakers, researchers, conservation practitioners, development agencies, and communities working towards the conservation, restoration, and sustainable management of India’s grasslands and other ONEs.

Why are grasslands so important?

1. Grasslands — home to the great Poaceae family, with its 10,000 to 12,000 members or species — cover vast swathes of landmass throughout the world and support a wide variety of animal life. They thrive in places where the rainfall is low, typically between 600 and 1500 mm annually.

2. They provide a host of ecosystem services — storing water and carbon, recycling chemicals, and controlling the climate.

(Infographic: AI-generated)

3. In India, almost a quarter of the landmass is covered in grassland. This includes the alpine meadows of the Himalayas, the chaurs in the foothills, the famous terai grasslands in the flood plains of the Ganges and Brahmaputra, the phumdis, or the quivering wet grasslands of Manipur (where the deer “dance”), the savannas of western and peninsular India and the renowned “sholas” of the Western Ghats.

4. Different names are used in the world to refer to grasslands. According to World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), it is known as ‘savannah’ in Africa, ‘cerrado’ in South America, ‘prairie’ in North America, ‘steppe’ in central Asia, and ‘meadow’ in the UK.

BEYOND THE NUGGET: India’s Second progress report on the Bonn Challenge

1. India has restored 21.7 million hectares of degraded and deforested land between 2011 and 2020, according to the country’s second progress report on the Bonn Challenge released by the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) on 17th June, 2026. This includes restoration through planted forests, natural regeneration, silviculture, agroforestry, and mangrove restoration.

2. The Bonn Challenge is a global initiative launched in 2011, with the efforts of the Government of Germany and IUCN. IUCN acts as the Secretariat of the Bonn Challenge.

3. The Bonn Challenge makes a commitment to restoring 150 million hectares of degraded and deforested landscapes by 2020, and an additional target of 350 million hectares by 2030.

4. The Bonn Challenge is a direct contribution to the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration. It offers a practical way of achieving international commitments, including the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), Aichi Biodiversity Targets of the Convention on Biodiversity (CBD), and the Paris Agreement

India’s Bonn Challenge pledge

1. India had pledged to restore 13 million hectares with an additional eight million hectares by 2030. This was revised to 26 million hectares by 2030 as announced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the 14th United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification held in 2019 in India.

2. In India, 1.45 million hectares, or 0.44 per cent of the total geographical area, experienced degradation between 2011-13 and 2018-19, while 97.85 million hectares, or 29.77 per cent of the country’s geographical area, are affected by land degradation and desertification.

3. About 461.14 million tonnes of carbon (343.66 million tonnes, accounting for plantation mortality) were estimated to be sequestered due to the restoration, according to the report. Land Use, Land-use change, and the forestry sector are among the key avenues for sequestering the planet-warming carbon dioxide.

4. Telangana topped the list of states that restored the highest land area at 4.18 million hectares, through an agroforestry push of over 3.6 million hectares. Madhya Pradesh, Odisha, Gujarat, and Andhra Pradesh were among the other states leading restoration efforts, according to the report.

5. The report attributed the progress to the combination of national schemes such as the Compensatory Afforestation Fund, the Green India Mission, the National Afforestation Programme, and the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, along with dedicated state-level greening efforts.

Post Read Question

In the grasslands, trees do not replace the grasses as a part of an ecological succession because of (UPSC CSE 2013)

(a) insects and fungi

(b) limited sunlight and paucity of nutrients

(c) water limits and fire

(d) None of the above

Answer Key

(c)

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