 Thank you all three of you for your excellent work and let's jump right into the discussion of like all the many challenges and exciting opportunities we have in India. And one thing that I really stood out to me in like Sima's talk in the closing remarks is like the diversity in the uptake of ecosystem service-based approaches or natural based approaches throughout India is really huge, right? So we have like some places that are really champions and that have like a long lasting tradition of applying such reasoning. But we have also these huge environmental challenges that the country faces and often in the West we mainly think about a series of like problems and like huge catastrophes and so on. But we don't really see so much of the opportunities. And I think my first question to all of three of you would be what are really the causes that lie behind this diversity that some places do so well and have like a century-long history of like working with nature to provide services to people. And in other places you see these like massive environmental degradation. What do you think are really the enabling factors and the causes for this diversity? I'll start. It's a difficult one because I think what I was trying to allude to in my presentation was even where there is a long history and I quite deliberately chose examples through my presentation from the same state, Himachal Pradesh, which has also worked very closely with Madhu in terms of sort of some of the quantification of these values. But equally when we kind of come towards the end of my presentation you can see that even in a state which has this long history, which has got this high-level policy commitment, they even have a policy on payments for ecosystem services, in a practical grounded example of a small town which is getting water from a wildlife sanctuary, there's absolutely no connection. So actually the top-down commitment doesn't often connect with what's happening at the bottom up. So let me broaden to respond to your question. I think the real challenge is that we've got pockets of really exciting good practice, but those are not scaling and in some senses the sort of initiatives that Sima ended with which are about connecting and bringing actors together so that the collective voice becomes stronger is really important because what you have is really interesting examples of good practice but I don't think they're operating in a connected enough way to make the kind of overall conversation shift. So the compass hasn't shifted. I mean I look forward to the manifestos of the political parties in the upcoming elections but I would be surprised if they have any serious concern over the issues we've just been talking about on this panel today. So you know and that's just a reflection of the things that matter. I mean the state of Madhya Pradesh just had its election six months ago and this was not salient to the debate even though it's taking huge strides in this direction. So that's the big challenge and I think the efforts to connect the conversations so that the good practice that we're hearing from can actually reinforce each other and amplify the voice is really I think the way to take it forward. So I welcome what you're leading. Bhaskar also mentioned the institutional challenges right. So I think that's also one of the reasons that where an individual leader is you know interested and is good you get some success but then the person gets transferred and it's not sustained and the institutions are not thinking holistically not coming together. So there are all these governance barriers as well. So one approach that we plan to pursue to bring together the stakeholders is what is probably well known in this room and what NATCAP has already also been working with which is the water funds. So water funds is a mechanism I mean watershed interventions in India have been going on for times immemorial. What the water fund approach that TNC and NATCAP have been pursuing in many locations brings to the table is a governance structure where you bring representatives of different departments and communities upstream and downstream together. We are at a very early journey in it. It's a very sensitive environment where even the term payment for ecosystem services is controversial. So you have so many you know it's like walking it through a land mine. You have to be careful every step of the way. We are hoping that somehow we can make that breakthrough with the water fund to demonstrate how you know environmental goods need to be governed and how we need to work across the silos within the government and outside the government. Well I think in India it's so happening that states where there's a huge dependency of people and natural resources and they also bear the brunt of degradation. You know we always work in reactionary mode than the precautionary mode or proactive mode. So like for example Himachal Pradesh people had such strong dependence on natural resources that they have no other option than to conserve the resources for perpetuity for the use in the future. It happened in Uttarakhand you might have heard about a great disaster happen because of the cloud burst a couple of years ago and the state becomes so proactive now that it is immediately a huge study for them to accomplish the work on doing accounting of forest resources there and also developing a sustainable environmental performance index. How well you're able to manage your resources. Same thing you're able to develop the state also. Similarly the recent experience of tsunami in coastal India I think Nailanjan will be discussing it works a lot on coastal you know ecosystems. How the regions where you had very well built protected mangroves which are very resilient ecosystems and able to absorb these shocks and able to you know withstand these storms were able to you know support save themselves very well then the ones where you have artificial decks constructed and they all collapsed and water gushed inside and huge you know devastation happened the result. So I've been watching over the years especially the states that the huge dependence are you know doing much better. The people are well informed the departments have got good information systems good databases and are able to do work much more intensively able to you know project these values quite close to you know the real values then the ones which I yet to actually face you know this kind of a brunt and then they will come forward but it is high time that we should go into more in a proactive mode and understand the importance of connect between conserving natural capital and then going for development. So I think things are changing at my own experience you know I was just mentioning in my initial I mean introductory talk that I need to go to these people policy makers the finance persons the technocrats used to be you know snapped by these people it is rubbed off you know but now get invited to do this work. So this is a changing paradigm changing mindset they realize the importance of conserving natural capital understanding the value and why it makes sense to invest in natural capital. Example of tiger conservation which is a charismatic species and well as species but when a tiger it's not just kind of conserving tigers conserving the entire habitat of tiger however it made huge difference in the you know areas joining to tiger reserves and also not just it gives sort of regional benefits but a lot of global benefits as well. Things are changing considerably but yes I understand I agree with other two speakers it has to enter into a mission mode because it is high time for India to save itself otherwise you cannot imagine it is only when you visit India realize the you know the importance of taking this approach and priority basis a huge population huge diversity huge heterogeneity as well so things have to be brought in together and definitely that approach will be a very very rewarding and useful approach in the future. Thank you for your reflection on that and the important point for sure is like being like proactive about like planning right and not only reacting to degradation and one topic that really seems to pop out there is like the massive investment into infrastructure that will happen in the very near future in India right and road infrastructure and water infrastructure and energy infrastructure and so on and there it seems to be really important to be proactive and that use that same to support strategic planning in order to avoid damages to ecosystems that might not be reversible actually and the I mean the interesting thing about like infrastructure is really that it can both deteriorate natural capital right let's think about the road for example that can destroy a forest or a hydropower dam that can disconnect the river right but that it also benefits from natural capital so for example natural forests around the road might reduce the risk of like landslides or interruption of that road or the catchment of a hydropower facility might provide services such as like more steady base flow to that facility that this is like really interesting link basically between infrastructure and natural capital both in like a positive and a negative sense and the need to really bring like or consider these two aspects together in my opinion I was wondering Sima you said it's like of course a very difficult topic to address because there's just such an urgent need for for development so I was wondering if you could probably reflect or if you could all a little bit reflect a little bit more on like also if you see any opportunities from this like infrastructure development that's going on for uptaking natural capital approaches I think I referenced this earlier as well the situation is such that the NGO community is almost sidelined in India civil society is sidelined and it's sidelined because I I've been part of the community so I'm not criticizing I I take the blame that we have not been solution providers to the government so the situation is that the government doesn't want to deal with civil society at the center at least very much so how do you change that dynamic is very important and I think that dynamic can only be shifted by becoming solution providers so I think there is and it's a tough journey it's a tough journey for TNC it's going to be a tough journey for NATCAP and if we partner together it becomes a little bit tougher because we are two foreign entities on this journey the only way to do it is by working with local actors and really trying to build a middle ground in India which is more solution oriented the middle in India is we talk about the political middle in the US in India I talk about the civil society middle it is non-existent we have two extremes of human rights and trick NGOs and you know wildlife centric NGOs we need solution providers in the middle and there are a few and we have to just keep them together and amplify you know their engagement with the government and we have made a breakthrough with respect to the 15th finance commission we've joined hands with about five Indian organizations to provide support to the finance commission on that seven and a half percent formula but this is just one you know effort so the other the other approach I think which is also fraught with some dangers but is probably a more immediate approach that can be taken is to work with businesses because businesses understand the challenge is much better that they themselves will face if they don't take care of the natural capital and the government is willing to talk to businesses and so partnering with businesses especially Indian businesses is very important and then I think a third approach is to really focus at the state level civil society spends far too much time talking to the government of India and the capacity at the state level is very weak I think donors need to come together with Indian civil society and really help focus their efforts at state levels where infrastructure actually gets built and then that's the right intervention point and the state governments are much more open to taking help I'll pick up at that last concluding comment of Sima's which is which is about the different scales at which these interventions can happen so I think I try to say that I also see the opportunities at the subnational scale as being potentially much more exciting even the current government talks about a spirit of I think they use the phrase competitive federalism they're trying to get the states to see their kind of achievements in a competitive spirit but they've also done that at subnational scales there's a sort of there's a smart cities initiative which has been launched I tried my best when they were trying to launch it to say smartness is not just technological smartness which is what the focus is but wouldn't it be good to have ecologically smart cities and actually the sort of slogan we should all collectively be talking about is ecologically smart infrastructure you know I mean if you're talking about this is not an anti infrastructure or an anti urbanization message but smartness needs to be ecologically smart decision making and I think we've missed a trick because the smart cities initiative I've looked at the plans submitted by all hundred cities not one of them has taken into account any of these ecological functions it's all about transport apps which are going to help people to have you know smoother flows of traffic through the city and it's nothing to do with the ecological smartness that we could we could take forward so I think there are these opportunities at subnational scale and then at district scale as well the the the successor to India's planning commission which is called the Niti Ayog has launched something called the hundred aspirational districts program so even in the rural sector they're trying to get districts to compete with each other in terms of developmental indicators and if those development indicators could reflect ecologically smart outcomes then I think there's a real opportunity so I do agree with that final point I have to gently disagree on the civil society stuff because partly governments which are solution oriented have rejected solutions which have been put forward so it's not that civil society actors haven't necessarily put forward solutions but they're often solutions that are not compatible with the current developmental mindset of the of the rural ruling dispensation so there is a difference we do have to recognize that it's not just about there are alternative pathways and there is a mindset which is prevalent at the moment which isn't necessarily willing to listen to solution oriented alternative pathways and that makes the conversation a bit more difficult so I'd I'd be a bit more cautious about suggesting that civil society has not been solution oriented enough there have been solutions but they don't necessarily match with the political leanings of of particular governments very complimenting what Seema and Bhaskar have said the end user experience in India has been you know I would say very challenging very interesting the same time it's been so happening that different actors are working in their own worlds they never try to you know go beyond their own boundaries to interact and then provide very holistic solutions but I think things are changing nowadays we are much more open we work in a landscape mode then in the mode of our own you know boundaries and then then go back to each other and then try to interact so that's what's happening in India things are changing changing for good definitely uh I also uh for the substitute Bhaskar has said uh we we talk a lot about ecological we talk a lot about so what physical infrastructure we never talk much about ecological infrastructure which plays such an important role in the Indian context I think we rightly said that the smart city is no longer it's not a smart city it's I would say it's a very unsmart way of you know developing a smart city you talk about all the gadgets all the you know hi-fi high-flung you know uh sort of equipments and uh apps to actually facilitate your living at the same time the base from where actually you derive your living is totally not taken into consideration so I think it's a need to merge ecological infrastructure with the physical infrastructure to develop a real kind of a smart city thirdly uh the work that we have been doing at anybody or like at emissions NGO civil society a lot of technical work also happens but doesn't translate into very simple kind of expression but how society can understand the technical work be done by all of us it's very very important to also convert because you're doing work for them but they're not aware of what work has been done how they can also participate contribute and the whole process becomes much more easier I think science would convert into a simple expression simple information sheets some kind of you know information uh ways can be given to the larger community and they become very responsive they could participate in the whole process and the solutions can be definitely very very easily forthcoming thank you all so much there would be a million more questions I would like to ask you but I would like also to give the audience the opportunity to ask some questions and first of all if you have a special guest here Nila and Jan gosh from WWF who uh India who's their senior economic advisor and also the director of the observer research foundation and um given his knowledge and experience you would like to first give him like the opportunity for a short reflection on the things we've heard so far is it working okay first of all I take the last point of Professor Varma I presume that one of the biggest challenges that we are facing in WWF India uh is with the communication element and that to in fact uh as far as the landscape coordinators are concerned in fact we have been conducting a host of studies in the context of natural capital assessment and valuation of ecosystem services ever since this entire program of ecological economics started in WWF India with me joining them as an advisor uh we intervened uh by uh valuing ecosystem services at a landscape level we developed an index known as the ecosystem dependency index so that it reflects on the amount of dependency that the local community essentially has on the ecosystem it's a simple ratio ratio in the sense uh the valuation of the ecosystem services concern primarily with the provisioning and the regulating ones divided by the income of the local community in most cases what we found that it was that as far as the rural communities are concerned the rural poor they are this ratio was turning out to be more than one that means they earning much more from the ecosystem services than from the incomes uh generated through their employment in other uh sectors now this essentially builds the case that ecosystem services is the GDP of the poor which essentially teed actually put across then in fact we tried to factor in uh ecosystem services and values in fact in uh project appraisals as well and also in the context of climate change uh where we found that in the delta regions of the Indian Sundarbans where uh essentially there was a large component of the vulnerable population which couldn't essentially stay there because of sea level rise and global warming and eventually they needed to be moved to the safer zones and the recommendation was that by 2050 this should happen and the ecosystem should be allowed to regenerate and when we essentially did the entire cost benefit analysis of the entire scheme of things with service sector employment taking place and the ecosystem services thus generated we found that this movement essentially has 12.8 times more benefits than the business as the usual case and finally taking your case of uh the flow regime we also did a valuation on how essentially uh various flow regimes can have ecosystem various ecosystem services now the biggest problem that we found was that fine technically we are publishing them but how do we essentially communicate these well first of all at the very local level to our own landscape coordinators and they are the ones who are taking it across to essentially the local level policymakers and the decision makers so this is one of the biggest challenges that we are facing we are still now grouping with that uh some of these in fact are already there in fact in this booklet which I have with me some of the findings of I mean the policy briefs I can I can keep that these in the reception and people are free to collect them from me so thank you so much thank you Nilanjan and Nilanjan will also give a presentation tomorrow I believe where he will like outline more of the details now I would like to invite like everybody here in the audience um to please raise your hands if you have any questions to our panelists let's probably take like collect one or two questions and then answer them I'll I'll introduce myself Paavit Ramachandran from the Asian Development Bank and good to see you Seema after so many years uh no I think I pick up on the question that you know I think was just being discussed in terms of uh change on the ground right and and I was quite intrigued because I you know happened to come from Chennai and uh you know I know some of the issues in terms of encroachment of water spread areas you know optimizing land so what was really I'd like to hear I mean certainly from TNC's perspective what was the trigger the catalyst for the change finally um was it competitive federalism or was it uh some other kind of uh you know agency on the ground because that something changed obviously right the smart city plans are now much more reflective of these considerations so that would be quite interesting to look at what actually shifted the needle on that and and the other question I think I had was uh related to you know ecosystem service valuation now I think there's a lot of work that's been done over several years now and I you know there's we don't need to belabor that points anymore people understand the importance of that I think the challenge has been really to move that to fiscal transfers you know when you're trying to convince policy makers grappling with you know resource constraints and how best to make the argument in terms of jobs incomes you know all the fiscal arguments that need to be made and you know the GDP of the poor argument takes that step forward but I think that's really the the challenge if you like I think really to translate what are largely imputed values I mean ecosystem service values are still to that extent imputed and move that to fiscal arguments so I just two points I'd like to hear reflections from the Chennai and I think Madhu might speak to the second question it's good to meet you again the world is round and our community is very small so Chennai as I mentioned has become the poster child of climate change and the only silver lining of that is a high level of awareness that we are suffering as citizens of Chennai because we made some very big mistakes and the citizens of Chennai now understand that those mistakes have to do with the fact that they built the airport on what was the you know area for their flood waters they've built an IT corridor a whole IT corridor on their wetlands and so all of this has come to haunt the city they have 300 of the lakes are gone they've become real estate only 150 are left so no wonder they have challenges in terms of meeting their daily water needs they have floods and they have droughts so that it's that awareness among citizens and the bureaucrats that has led to the city finally recognizing that they must tackle the lakes issue as part of their smart city plan and you're right Bhaskar very few cities have tried to focus on green infrastructure when we were looking at you know through the smart city filter where we should go and work there were only like a couple of cities that really prioritized their water infrastructure Coimbatore was one of them and Chennai was another one of them I totally agree with you that we need to take forward the evaluation aspect in converting them into some kind of pavement mechanisms we'll experiment of course the Marshall study which I just mentioned which Bhaskar also quoted led to conversion of value into a charge compensation for the loss of ecological value further led to creation of net present value regime in the country but why was this watching that we do have a value for diversion of forest but there's no such value for conservation of forest that's how the whole you know study for finance commission came into being and the first study which we did for 13 finance commission were able to appreciate to some extent give some amount of grant money to the to the country to various states rather but then to realize and but we further demonstrated two very sophisticated formula considering not just you know the forest cover but the larger set of indicators like biodiversity richness the integrity of areas the compartmentalization all such things are considered then it it felt convinced and it had given huge amount of money 0.7 billion to the jump of almost 700 billion was a huge jump which happened in the in the country in terms of value which was given to these states with devolution of taxes it became to till date you know it was quoted in many platforms to be one of the largest p.s in the world in terms of compensating states for conserving their resource space but we had an experience of Himachal Pradesh and Bhaskar and couple of other organizations way back and you know again 2005 and six to set up a kind of a payment for ecosystem model on one-to-one basis of it is done in Brazil, Costa Rica, Ecuador like that but in India we realize the cost of transaction is huge it worked very well in project mode when you leave it aside and let other communities to come together and set up these models then don't work as such the populations are diverse located geographically very far off places and heterogeneous as well so this became a much more easier way of compensating states for conserving national resource base through the finance commission and on this finance commission we expanded our calculers for not just forest we talked about this this 7.5 percent retention we talked about further allocation of grant for cashment area treatment for couple of other interventions but also talk about this which Sima also brought in her study in a presentation achievement of NDC you know we have targets given to us from 2.5 to 3.5 billion tons of carbon so we are trying to achieve this for another sequestered grant regarding you know trees outside forest the forest area is not enough actually to address these issues so there we can also do that and also looking at the water quality you know waste management and the air quality aspect so this is how we are addressing the establishing the connect between value and the payment for ecosystems but through finance commission because it has at least transaction costs compared to one-to-one basis kind of okay thank you very much on this note I would like to close the session and I would like to invite you all to give a very warm applause to our speakers who came from so far and I think we can all be very excited at the natural capital project in the broader kind of conservation community towards the opportunities and changes that need to be addressed in India thank you so much again and