Brainstorming on the Future of the Highly Threatened Medicinal Plants of the Western Himalaya, India

Abstract

The Himalayan ecosystems are a hotspot of biodiversity; they also regulate climate and provide livelihood to over a billion people. These ecosystems are stressed owing to urbanization, over-exploitation of forest resources including rampant removal of medicinal and aromatic plants, and rapid threat from illegal trade in wildlife and poaching 1 . Cumula-tive effects of these have resulted in enhanced species extinction and high hazard frequency 2 . In order to address these threats and conservation issues, the Government of India (GoI) in 2017 initiated the project SECURE Himalaya ‘Securing livelihoods, conservation, sustainable use and restoration of high range Himalayan ecosystems’ – a landscape-based approach towards the holistic con-servation of biodiversity and sustainable utilization of wild resource base. This project is a collaboration between the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC), GoI and Global Environment Facility (GEF). It focuses on the Greater and Trans-Himalayan landscapes of India encom-passing the states of Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh (HP), Uttarakhand and Sikkim. It is well known that these land-scapes are the habitat of snow leopard, wild prey species and their associated habitats as well as various remote agro-pastoral communities.