A FUTURE WITH FORESTS, REEFS...  - Rapid Appraisal of Natural Habitat
Nina Sengupta

Wild genetic resources are being increasingly used to improve crops and livestock and as new sources of food and raw material.  It is therefore essential for us to conserve these genetic resources and if possible use them for breeding programmes to produce new and improved varieties in the future.  In addition, the ‘existence value’ of wildlife and its habitat, though not quantifiable, is enormous.  In-situ conservation is the only way to save natural habitats and the best way to conserve diverse biological resources.  But habitat destruction and over exploitation has destroyed many biotic resources and deprived many local communities of their means of livelihood.

Given the urgent need to preserve the pristine patches and ensure sustainable utilisation of natural habitats, it is imperative to initiate scientific studies which would clearly identify habitats:

 - which need to be conserved
 - which demand sustainable utilisation patterns
 - which are available for development

However, studies of this nature require a lot of time ranging from one to five years or more for a particular habitat.  Given the variety of natural habitats in India owing to the geographical and climatic variations, it is not possible to cover the entire country at one go and then design interventions.

One way of overcoming this constraint is to develop a tool for rapid appraisal which can help identify specific areas of long-term research and action for a particular natural habitat.  Primarily, such a tool can enable immediate action, wherever required, to reverse degradation and facilitate conservation.  It will also be a useful  tool for impact assessment of development projects.
 

 

Rapid appraisal can give us only a generic idea about an area and cannot be equated with a detailed long-term study.  Yet, it facilitates scoping out and prioritising future development and research options.

A rapid appraisal technique would  surely help reduce the wide gap that exists between information required about the current status of natural habitats and that available.  Moreover, like rapid rural appraisal (RRA) such techniques need to be simple and concise so that they can be easily understood and adopted by a large number of people even outside the discipline of natural sciences.

In those areas where natural habitats exist, the technique for the rapid  for their rapid  appraisal will complement the existing RRA technique which is used to identify the needs and priorities of the people, their interaction with the local resources, and the forces that trigger non-sustainable resource utilisaiton patterns.

One drawback of EIA is that although it incorporates rural appraisal, it does not stress on the appraisal of the natural habitat itself and therefore seldom recognises the functions of the latter, apart from being a source livelihood.  A technique for appraisal of natural habitats would provide a more realistic picture, based on which decisions can be taken, interventions designed and natural habitats monitored on a regular basis.  This will also help in prioritising research areas for natural sciences and conservation biology.

Developing and establishing a proper technique for such a rapid evaluation technique, however, will require rigorous research.  For any kind of natural habitat, it would includes setting standards, testing a wide range of parameters and identifying a few crucial ones which will be useful for rapid appraisal.  The critical parameters need to be such that they are simple to learn and replicate and are able to provide accurate information in relatively short period.

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