 Hello. Good morning everybody. Great to see so many people known and unknown here for this early session that I'm having the great honor to chair today. My name is Raphael Schmitt and I'm a researcher with the Natural Capital Project here at Stanford. And this session I think is really a great starter for our symposium in 2019. In this session we will put a spotlight on natural capital approaches in India and I'll be actually co-leading this session together with Mary Rookershaus, our managing director here at the Natural Capital Project at Stanford in January. I think for all of us at the Natural Capital Project, India really presents an exciting and also very urgent opportunity. India is amongst the world's fastest growing economies as we all know and this economic and also demographic growth really puts an incredible richness in ecosystems and the natural capital that India still holds until today into potential danger. And I think to make India's development more sustainable will really require accelerating the uptake of natural capital approaches to make rates of population or to really match the rapid rates of population and socioeconomic growth. And in terms of topics, in terms of some of the core topics that are relevant in India, thinking for example about the rapid urbanization or development of infrastructures, the challenges in India really touch on some of the core priorities of the Natural Capital Project to date. And I think often when we talk to colleagues about India here at NetCap or elsewhere, we are often astonished by the size of the challenges that we are facing in India, the size of the country, the amount of people and yeah, as I mentioned, the very rapid growth. But one thing that gives me really hope is the very unique and strong link between nature and people in India. So just to give you an example, my research area is the or our ecosystem services that are provided by large rivers to people and India with its two major rivers, the Ganges and Pramaputra has probably two rivers on this planet that are unparalleled in terms of the pressures they are facing from urbanization, from infrastructure development, from water abstraction and so on. But then at the same time, there are also probably few other rivers on this planet that are so much revered by people and that have such a great cultural importance for the people and that are actually considered wholly by a major part of the population in India. And I think this example is really makes me very confident that we will be able to find strategies that accommodate economic growth in India and growth of livelihoods and livelihood opportunities for people and at the same time don't spend too much of the country's natural capital. And with this, I would like to close and I would like to say that we have gathered a panel of really very distinguished speakers here today who will discuss their inspiring contributions in terms of science, their policy work that ranges from watersheds to cities and mentioning and discussing the challenges that India needs to meet in order to make its growth sustainable. And it sends my pleasure to introduce first our four panellists today that will give short presentations introducing their work now. Just go in the order of the presentations. First, we have Bhaskar Veerar who is a professor for political economy at the department of geography at the University of Cambridge and Bhaskar will lay out the background and the challenges for natural capital in India. Our next speaker is Professor Madhu Verma from the Indian Institute of Forest Management in Bhopal and Madhu's presentation will really be to highlight how better valuation and also modeling quantification of ecosystem services can help us moving from a paradigm of conservation versus development to conservation and development. Our third speaker is Professor Harini Nagentra from the other Cambridge University in Bangalore and unfortunately Harini couldn't join us today for medical reasons, but we have a short video recording of her talk in which she will send us, hopefully she will convey her QE messages. And last, but certainly not least, we have Sima Paul who has been on the stage before. She is the managing director of the India program of the Nature Conservancy and Sima will give us some insights into the innovative work they are doing showcasing how NGOs can be really instrumental for educating future champions, future leaders for promoting nature-based solutions. And with that I would like to welcome our first speaker, Bhaskar Veerai. That's great. Thank you very much Rafael and thank you for the invitation to the entire natural capital family. I've been wanting to come to the symposium for many years and by focusing on India you've finally given me no excuse for not being here. So thank you for that invitation. I'm really looking forward to the whole week actually and I'm privileged to be kicking it off. So it's really nice to be talking about applications of these ideas in the Indian context. What I'm going to do to set things up is really take you through sort of slightly longer historical detail. You know the language that we today use to describe these relationships is a language that is evolving. It's evolving with the kind of histories that Gretchen so sort of clearly laid out. You know we've been trying to develop these ideas at least since the last 25 to 30 years but of course the recognition that humanity has a close relationship with nature is something that's been around for a much longer period in time and has had different ways in which it's been recognized in terms of people's relationships and how those can be harnessed in order to kind of enhance well-being. So I want to set this slightly in a longer historical context even though the language that people might have used was not the language that we use today in terms of ecosystem services, natural capital and so on. So that's really the kind of context and then I want to kind of zoom into the contemporary and talk a little bit more about the opportunities as well as challenges and possibly lay the ground for what I know some of my fellow panelists are going to talk about in more detail. So that's really my plan. So I want to take us back at least to the middle of the 19th century when what I see is you know some of the early applications of the thinking that is now visible in the approaches that we use in a natural capital context started to become visible in India. The Forest Department in the northern Indian state of Himachal Pradesh had started introducing controls on grazing as early as that period. Recognizing the close connections in terms of hydrology, recognizing the importance of forest cover in relation to soil erosion, obviously not describing it using our contemporary language of natural capital but those are very early restrictions being placed in relation to managing nature and managing the sort of outputs from nature. These were ecological justifications. They didn't necessarily have the depth of scientific research to underpin some of these relationships and a lot of them were based on assumptions about changes in landscapes, changes in tree cover and the impacts that they may have presumptively on soil erosion, on downstream hydrological services and so on, some of which have been tested and verified, some of which have been challenged and we know that the science is continuing to evolve. Probably one of the earliest forest protection examples in relation to urban water supply was also introduced in Himachal Pradesh at that time. Shimla used to be the imperial capital. The plains of Delhi used to get too hot for the colonial rulers so they had to escape up to the hills and Shimla was the imperial capital about 6,000 feet above sea level. To secure water for the imperial capital they protected a water catchment in order to supply water and this was taking place in the 19th century. So applications that we now see as familiar ones in the natural capital dialogue were beginning to emerge as early as then. I'm taking you through sort of a very quick 100-year history and I think the next landmark I want you to point out was in 1980 the Indian government introduced probably one of the shortest pieces of legislation. It's a really short act if you read it called the Forest Conservation Act. The purpose of it was a growing sense within the central government. India has a federal polity so they've got state governments and central governments. A sense that the central government was losing control over forest protection because the state governments were encouraging developmental activities that were coming at the expense of forests. So the act was actually a centralizing act. It was an act which said that the power to divert forest resources should be taken away from state governments and controlled by the federal government in Delhi. It wasn't necessarily saying no development would be permitted but what it said was that the locus of decision making was shifting from state governments to the national capital because the national capital would be better able to think about the ecological consequences of development whereas state governments were facing pressures for development for obvious reasons. But the important thing from our perspective was that it is the precursor of what has been then subsequently applied as some really new innovative thinking and I know Madhu is going to talk about this also in relation to how can we actually then think about the value of forests and what is that value? So diversion was not prohibited under the Forest Conservation Act but if it was allowed it had to be accompanied with compensatory afforestation, the recreation of forests in what the legislation calls non-forest areas. Today we might see this as an offsetting program but it was introduced in that context. One of the states in 1999 Madhu Pradesh introduced an additional charge on project proponents saying that the future forest income that the state was deriving from forestry operations also needed to be compensated because the loss of forest was also a loss of an income generating resource and other states followed that the state of Himachal Pradesh which I've already mentioned started talking about compensation for the loss of environmental value which of course immediately begged the question what is the environmental value of forests? Can somebody give us a number? So the Supreme Court of India which had been intervening in the relation to forest protection firstly confirmed the application of this principle across the country and then said let's try and assess what that number might be. What is the net present value of forests? They had a sort of a committee which went into this and started to accumulate from developers contributions towards a fund which is called the Compensatory Afforestation Management Fund which currently sits with over seven billion US dollars waiting to be spent on this compensatory forestry activity. So that's the sort of precursor of what we will familiarly recognize as applications of these principles. This then took on another interesting dimension. I've already mentioned the federal structure in India which is you have the center and the state governments. A lot of the tax revenues go to the central government and there's a complex formula by which central government tax revenues are then recycled back to the state governments in order to encourage their developmental activity and this covers the whole spectrum of resource transfers from the center to the states. That's managed by something called the Finance Commission which meets once every five years and comes up with a formula through which central tax revenues are then passed on to the state governments. The 12th Finance Commission started asking the question about environmentally linked transfers and in particular in relation to forest cover the argument that was made by forest rich states that had a high percentage of their land area under forests was that there were two impacts. One was that there was an opportunity cost associated with maintaining forest cover. Maintaining forest cover meant that these states were giving up developmental opportunities and that opportunity cost should be taken into account. The second was that they started to use the argument of ecosystem services that by having high forest cover these states and Rafael's already mentioned the major rivers for example. The major rivers originate in the hill states which are often forested but the benefits of those are then experienced by half a billion people who live in the Gangetic plain. So this idea of ecosystem services being provided by states that were holding on to their forest cover in order to benefit the rest of the country was also put forward as an argument for changing the formula through which interstate central transfers to the states were then provided. The most recent Finance Commission which is the 14th Finance Commission has come up with a formula which says that up to seven and a half percent of fiscal transfers from the central government to the states will be based on an assessment of forest cover. So you're actually recognizing the stock of natural capital assets as an input into deciding how much money goes from the center to the state governments and that could be values of up to 6 to 12 billion. I'm not going to dwell too much on this because the expert on this is sitting in the room and she's going to speak after me which is Madhu Verma. She's been advising the Finance Commission. She's advising the 15th Finance Commission which is currently sitting so I'm sure she can't tell us what the formula is going to be but she can tell us about the process. So I'm going to and if people are interested there was a recent paper in conservation letters describing this so I've given a link to that at the bottom but the interesting thing is that this is an unconditional transfer so it isn't in some senses incorporating the principle of conditionality that some payments for ecosystem services obviously imply so we need to we need to recognize that this is essentially a compensatory transfer for holding on to a high natural capital asset. I'm going to switch very quickly to some recent research which we've just come to the end of so this was supported by a really innovative UK research program called ESPA which has just come to an end. It was called ecosystem services for poverty alleviation 10 years of funding which really encouraged a lot of innovative projects to think about these connections the connections between protecting national ecosystems and human well-being we were lucky enough to get a really interesting project towards the end and we focused in on six small towns now I know there's a focus in this symposium on livable cities I think it's really important to recognize how much of the pressure of urbanization is being experienced not just in mega cities but in small towns that are burgeoning all around the world and we decided to focus on small towns in the Himalayas because we thought that would be a good way to think about these relationships between these new urban settlements and the nature that supports them so that was the focus of our research I'm going to zoom in on just one of our case studies because it helps to illustrate the point that I'm making some images from the town it's a small town called Rajgarh it has a population of about five to ten thousand people depending on how you count it and it's a classic example of urbanization the images show you the way in which buildings are coming up in a relatively unplanned way in a quite complex and sometimes hazardous environment it's a mountain environment the image on the bottom right is a series of springs that exist across the town and people rely on those springs for part of their water supply but the municipal water supply is actually supplied by a wildlife sanctuary which is about 15 kilometers away from town and there's this there's this pipeline which connects the sanctuary all the way to the town and is providing this service so it is incorporating many of the principles that we're talking about in relation to ecosystem services the protection of certain critical water zones and recognizing these hydrological connections it's an already protected area because it's a wildlife sanctuary under India's legislation so it doesn't need additional protection what it does need is a recognition that this sanctuary is actually supplying hydrological services to a town which is 15 kilometers away so we had a look at the wildlife sanctuaries management plan and this is where the challenges start to become visible so the wildlife sanctuaries management plan has a list of things that are important but it doesn't mention water it does not mention the fact that this wildlife sanctuary is supplying water to this burgeoning town 15 kilometers away the irrigation engineers had never walked to the wildlife sanctuary because that was the domain of the forest department it didn't have anything to do with the irrigation department and I think this is where I'm beginning to sort of conclude with what I see the big challenges as well as opportunities and it's really this challenge of integration how do we get the different communities that are working in this area to actually talk to each other water supply is the joint responsibility of the irrigation and public health department and the municipality protection of the sanctuary is the responsibility of the forest department in the intervening area you've got agriculture which is looked after by the rural development and agricultural departments and none of those departments are actually talking to each other seeing this as an integrated resource that all of them are co-managing so how do we seize this opportunity so those are my sort of concluding thoughts I would summarize what I think is happening as a hesitant and perhaps slightly uncoordinated approach to natural capital at the moment in India that doesn't mean that the opportunities don't exist a quick word of warning civil society extends across many different types of sub sectors some of the human rights related groups and the forest rights related groups are slightly cautious about the language of capital so we should be aware of those concerns and recognize that we need to take those on board I've talked about the lack of coordination I don't think we have the level of political salience that has been demonstrated in places like Costa Rica and thanks to the efforts of the Nat Cap team in places like China India is about to embark on its next general election 600 million people are going to vote I'd be surprised if any political party has natural capital or anything which we could even interpret as natural capital in its manifesto so that's a big challenge but I think there is still potential I think there's real opportunity at the subnational scale at the state governments and at local scales and I know a lot of the conversation that will follow we'll talk about cities and urban opportunities as well so I think there are opportunities but I don't think we're there yet thank you