Biodiversity and Conservation

Why this chapter matters for UPSC: This is Chapter 14 in the current rationalised NCERT Fundamentals of Physical Geography (Reprint 2026-27), the only chapter left in Unit VI "Life on the Earth". This site keeps the old chapter number, 16. The chapter is short in NCERT, but its subject is one of the most heavily tested areas of the GS3 environment syllabus: threat categories and species, protected areas, hotspots and the biodiversity conventions.

Contemporary hook: On 3 August 2026 the Environment Minister announced Glaw Lake in Arunachal Pradesh's Kamlang Tiger Reserve as India's 101st Ramsar site and the state's first (All India Radio). The 100th, the Jai Prakash Narayan Bird Sanctuary (Surha Tal) in Ballia, Uttar Pradesh, was designated on 5 June 2026. The sixth All India Tiger Estimation is under way in 2026; until its report is released, the official tiger figure remains the 2022 estimate.

🧠 First Principles — Read This First

Biodiversity means the variety of life in a place. NCERT describes it at three levels. Genetic diversity is the variation within one species: two rice varieties, or two people of different height, differ because their genes differ. Species diversity is the number and variety of species in an area. Ecosystem diversity is the range of habitats and ecological processes, such as forest, grassland, wetland and coral reef.

Variety matters because it makes living systems more stable. A crop with many genetic varieties is less likely to be wiped out by one disease. An ecosystem with many species can keep functioning if one species declines. People also draw food, medicines, timber and fibre directly from this variety.

Species have always gone extinct; NCERT notes that 99% of all species that have ever lived are extinct. The concern today is the speed. The IPBES Global Assessment (2019) estimates the current extinction rate at least tens to hundreds of times higher than the average over the past 10 million years, driven mainly by human use of land and sea and direct exploitation of species.

Conservation has two approaches. In-situ conservation protects species where they live, by protecting their habitat in national parks, sanctuaries and similar areas. Ex-situ conservation keeps them outside their habitat, in zoos, botanical gardens and seed banks, as a backup when the wild population is at risk.

Why UPSC cares: Prelims regularly asks which species belongs to which threat category, what is allowed in which type of protected area, and what each convention does; Mains asks how biodiversity varies in India and how the law protects it.

PART 1 — Quick Reference

Table 1: Levels of biodiversity (NCERT)

Table 2: Threat categories, NCERT vs the current IUCN Red List

The full current scale has nine categories: Extinct (EX), Extinct in the Wild (EW), Critically Endangered (CR), Endangered (EN), Vulnerable (VU), Near Threatened (NT), Least Concern (LC), Data Deficient (DD) and Not Evaluated (NE). Only CR, EN and VU count as "threatened". Use NCERT's three categories when a question quotes NCERT; use the nine categories otherwise.

Table 3: Current Red List status of species often asked about

Sources: assessment citations as listed in Sources below. IUCN's own site could not be opened from our environment; statuses were checked against the assessors' and specialist groups' published citations.

Table 4: India's protected-area network, three official counts

The three sources have different dates and bases. The WII figure is a dated database count with area. NCERT's 107 national parks is a textbook figure with no date. The March 2026 figures come from a news report of a parliamentary speech; its category numbers (106 + 574 + 309 = 989) do not add up to its total of 1,034, so treat the breakdown with caution.

The most recent official total is in a written reply to the Rajya Sabha: protected areas rose from 981 in 2020 to 1,134 in 2025, tiger reserves from 50 to 58 and elephant reserves from 30 to 33 over the same period (PIB, 5 Feb 2026). That reply gives no category breakdown, so it is not a fourth column in the table. It is the figure to quote for the current size of the network.

Table 5: Other conservation networks and counts

Table 6: Conventions and bodies

PART 2 — Concepts & Narrative

What biodiversity is, in NCERT's terms

NCERT defines biodiversity as "the number and variety of organisms found within a specified geographic region", covering plants, animals and micro-organisms, the genes they contain and the ecosystems they form. Today's biodiversity is the product of 2.5–3.5 billion years of evolution. NCERT gives global species estimates of 2 million to 100 million, with 10 million as the best estimate; the IPBES Global Assessment (2019) uses about 8 million animal and plant species. The average half-life of a species is estimated at one to four million years.

Biodiversity is not spread evenly. It is consistently richer in the tropics; towards the poles one finds "larger and larger populations of fewer and fewer species" (NCERT). NCERT explains this through inputs of solar energy and water, which drive weathering, soil formation and plant growth.

Why biodiversity matters: NCERT's three roles

NCERT groups the importance of biodiversity under three roles, a frequent 150-word exercise question.

• Ecological role. Every species performs some function in its ecosystem: capturing and storing energy, producing and decomposing organic matter, cycling water and nutrients, fixing atmospheric gases and regulating climate. The more diverse an ecosystem, the better its chances of surviving disturbance and the more productive it tends to be.
• Economic role. Biodiversity supplies food crops, livestock, forests, fish and medicinal resources. NCERT singles out crop diversity, or agro-biodiversity. It also notes that treating biodiversity only as a "reservoir of resources" has itself driven its decline and created conflicts over who owns and shares those resources.
• Scientific role. Each species offers clues to how life evolved and how ecosystems work. NCERT adds an ethical point: every species has an intrinsic right to exist, so causing extinction voluntarily is morally wrong.

The IPBES Global Assessment gives figures for the economic role: more than 75% of global food crop types rely on animal pollination; about 70% of cancer drugs are natural or synthetic products inspired by nature; and about 4 billion people rely primarily on natural medicines.

Loss of biodiversity

NCERT lists these causes:

• Population pressure and overuse. Tropical regions cover about a quarter of the world's area but hold about three-quarters of its people. Deforestation and over-exploitation there are especially damaging because tropical rainforests "contain 50 per cent of the species on the earth".
• Natural calamities such as earthquakes, floods, volcanic eruptions, forest fires and droughts.
• Pollution by pesticides, hydrocarbons and toxic heavy metals, which destroy sensitive species.
• Exotic species. NCERT defines them as species "which are not the natural inhabitants of the local habitat but are introduced into the system". Their introduction has damaged many natural communities. In India, Lantana camara, water hyacinth and Parthenium are common examples of invasive plants.
• Poaching of tigers, elephants, rhinoceroses, crocodiles, minks and birds for horns, tusks and hides.

The IPBES Global Assessment (May 2019) ranked the direct drivers of nature's decline globally, in descending order of impact: (1) changes in land and sea use, (2) direct exploitation of organisms, (3) climate change, (4) pollution and (5) invasive alien species. It also found that the number of invasive alien species per country has risen by about 70% since 1970 in the 21 countries with detailed records. A common revision mnemonic is HIPPO: Habitat loss, Invasive species, Pollution, human Population, Overharvesting. The IPBES ranking is the citable version for Mains answers.

Hotspots and megadiversity

NCERT calls the tropical countries that hold a large share of the world's species "mega diversity centres" and lists 12: Mexico, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Brazil, DR Congo, Madagascar, China, India, Malaysia, Indonesia and Australia. UNEP's World Conservation Monitoring Centre now recognises 17 megadiverse countries, including India.

NCERT says the IUCN identified biodiversity hotspots and that hotspots "are defined according to their vegetation", because plants determine an ecosystem's primary productivity. The concept actually comes from Norman Myers (1988), and the numerical criteria come from Conservation International's 1999 review: at least 1,500 endemic vascular plant species and at least 70% loss of primary native vegetation (CEPF). There are 36 hotspots; India includes parts of four: Western Ghats–Sri Lanka, Himalaya, Indo-Burma and Sundaland (through the Nicobar Islands). NCERT's examples are Madagascar, where about 85% of plants and animals are found nowhere else, and Hawaii, where unique species are threatened by introduced species and land development.

Conserving biodiversity: what NCERT prescribes

India and 155 other nations signed the Convention on Biological Diversity at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in June 1992 (NCERT). NCERT gives the World Conservation Strategy's six steps:

1. Preserve species that are endangered.
2. Plan and manage to prevent extinction.
3. Preserve varieties of food crops, forage plants, timber trees, livestock and their wild relatives.
4. Each country should identify the habitats of wild relatives and protect them.
5. Safeguard habitats where species feed, breed, rest and nurse their young.
6. Regulate international trade in wild plants and animals.

NCERT also stresses that conservation with sustainable use works only with the involvement of local communities, which needs local institutions.

India's legal framework

Wild Life (Protection) Act, 1972. NCERT calls it the main legal framework for wildlife: it protects scheduled species and gives legal backing to national parks and sanctuaries. NCERT notes a comprehensive amendment in 1991 that made punishments stricter and added protection for specified plants. Conservation reserves and community reserves were added as new protected-area categories by a later amendment. The amendment of December 2022 gave enforcement powers to the Indian Coast Guard and listed the Gangetic and Indus river dolphins as distinct species in Schedule I (PIB, Mar 2025); it also inserted Section 62A, which lets the Centre regulate or prohibit the import, trade, possession or spread of invasive alien species.

National parks vs sanctuaries. A national park is the stricter category: once it is notified, local rights such as grazing and collecting forest produce are settled and not allowed inside. In a wildlife sanctuary some regulated activities can be permitted. Biosphere reserves and Ramsar sites explicitly allow sustainable use. UPSC asked this distinction in Prelims 2012 (see Practice Questions).

Biosphere reserves are recognised within UNESCO's Man and Biosphere (MAB) Programme and combine a strictly protected core, a buffer zone and a transition zone where people live and work. India has 18; the first was Nilgiri (1986) and the latest on NCERT's list is Panna (2011). Thirteen are in UNESCO's World Network after the Cold Desert reserve in Himachal Pradesh (about 7,770 km², covering Pin Valley NP and the Kibber and Chandratal sanctuaries) was added in September 2025.

Biological Diversity Act, 2002. This implements the CBD in India. It set up a three-tier structure: the National Biodiversity Authority, State Biodiversity Boards, and Biodiversity Management Committees at the local-body level, which prepare People's Biodiversity Registers. It regulates access to biological resources and associated traditional knowledge and provides for benefit-sharing. The Biological Diversity (Amendment) Act, 2023 replaced criminal punishment for many violations with monetary penalties and exempted AYUSH practitioners and local communities from prior intimation to State Biodiversity Boards when using biological resources based on codified traditional knowledge.

Ex-situ conservation in India

• Zoos are regulated by the Central Zoo Authority and run conservation-breeding programmes.
• Botanical gardens keep living plant collections for research and education.
• Seed and gene banks store seeds, tissues and genetic material at low temperature; India's national genebank is at the ICAR–National Bureau of Plant Genetic Resources, New Delhi. Internationally, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway holds backup copies of seed collections.
• Conservation breeding with release, as for the Great Indian Bustard and gharial, links ex-situ and in-situ conservation.

The global framework after 2022

The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, adopted at CBD COP15 on 19 December 2022, has 4 goals for 2050 and 23 targets for 2030. Two targets are commonly asked:

• Target 3 ("30 by 30"): at least 30% of land and inland waters and 30% of coastal and marine areas effectively conserved by 2030 through protected areas and other effective area-based conservation measures, respecting the rights of indigenous peoples and local communities.
• Target 19: mobilise at least US$200 billion a year for biodiversity from all sources by 2030, including international finance from developed to developing countries of at least US$20 billion a year by 2025 and US$30 billion by 2030.

India's updated National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan, aligned to the framework, sets 23 national targets and was launched at COP16 in Cali, Colombia, on 30 October 2024.

PART 3 — UPSC Integration

In-situ vs ex-situ

Threats and India's legal and policy responses

National policy framework: National Wildlife Action Plan 2017–2031 (landscape-level conservation, community involvement, climate change); National Human-Wildlife Conflict Mitigation Strategy and Action Plan 2021–26 (PIB, Mar 2025).

PYQ pattern (from the question banks)

• Prelims: which group of animals is endangered (2012, env-063); in which protected area local people may not collect biomass (2012, env-064); what the Red Data Books contain (2011, env-061); Madhav tiger reserve and Ramsar site (prelims-2026-gs1-022); Western Hoolock Gibbon (prelims-2026-gs1-032).
• Mains: variation of biodiversity in India and the Biological Diversity Act (GS3 2018); Ramsar "wise use" (GS3 2018); National Wetland Conservation Programme and Ramsar sites (GS3 2023); natural vegetation diversity and rain-forest sanctuaries (GS1 2023); protecting traditional medicine from patenting (GS3 2019).

Mains frameworks

• Biodiversity loss: drivers (IPBES ranking) → Indian examples → legal and institutional response → gaps (habitat outside PAs, grassland neglect, human-wildlife conflict) → KMGBF and NBSAP targets.
• Protected areas: categories and their rules → coverage (5.32% under WII NWDC count, 2023) vs the 30×30 target → corridors and landscapes → community rights.
• Access and benefit-sharing: Biological Diversity Act, Nagoya Protocol, the 2023 amendment's trade-off between easing AYUSH use and protecting community benefit-sharing.

Exam Strategy

• NCERT categories vs IUCN: NCERT's "Endangered, Vulnerable, Rare" is an older scheme; "Rare" is not a current Red List category.
• Snow leopard is VU (since 2017), not EN. Gharial is CR, not VU. Ganges river dolphin is EN.
• Cheetah: extinct in India is a national status; the species is VU globally. EX in the Red List means extinct everywhere.
• The baiji is Chinese, not Indian.
• Counts that differ by source: national parks 106 (WII, 2023) vs 107 (NCERT); UNESCO biosphere reserves 13 (since Sep 2025) vs 12 (NCERT); megadiverse countries 17 (UNEP-WCMC) vs 12 (NCERT); hotspots 36 (CEPF) vs 34 (older count).
• Hotspots were not defined by IUCN, despite NCERT's wording; the concept is Myers (1988) and the thresholds are Conservation International's (1999).
• National park vs sanctuary vs biosphere reserve: strictest is the national park; biosphere reserves and Ramsar sites allow sustainable use.
• Nagoya Protocol = access and benefit-sharing. CITES = trade. Ramsar = wetlands. CMS = migratory species.
• Indian Rhino Vision 2020 = translocation (in-situ), not captive breeding.

Practice Questions

1. UPSC Prelims 2012 (bank ID env-063): "Which one of the following groups of animals belongs to the category of endangered species?" (a) Great Indian Bustard, Musk Deer, Red Panda and Asiatic Wild Ass (b) Kashmir Stag, Cheetal, Blue Bull and Great Indian Bustard (c) Snow Leopard, Swamp Deer, Rhesus Monkey and Saras (Crane) (d) Lion-tailed Macaque, Blue Bull, Hanuman Langur and Cheetal. Official key: (a). Statuses change: the bank notes that the Asiatic wild ass was later moved out of Endangered.
2. UPSC Prelims 2012 (bank ID env-064): "In which one among the following categories of protected areas in India are local people not allowed to collect and use the biomass?" (a) Biosphere Reserves (b) National Parks (c) Wetlands declared under Ramsar Convention (d) Wildlife Sanctuaries. Official key: (b).
3. UPSC Prelims 2011 (bank ID env-061): "The 'Red Data Books' published by the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) contain lists of: 1. Endemic plant and animal species present in the biodiversity hotspots 2. Threatened plant and animal species 3. Protected sites for conservation of nature and natural resources in various countries." (a) 1 and 3 (b) 2 only (c) 2 and 3 (d) 3 only. Official key: (b).
4. UPSC Mains GS3 2018 (gs3-pyq-2018-17): "How does biodiversity vary in India? How is the Biological Diversity Act, 2002 helpful in the conservation of flora and fauna?"
5. UPSC Mains GS3 2023 (gs3-pyq-2023-04): "Comment on the National Wetland Conservation Programme initiated by the Government of India and name a few India's wetlands of international importance included in the Ramsar Sites."

📦 Revision Capsule

Sources

Sources

• NCERT, Fundamentals of Physical Geography, Class XI, Rationalised Edition, Reprint 2026-27, Ch 14 "Biodiversity and Conservation", kegy214.pdf.
• NCERT, India: Physical Environment, Class XI, Reprint 2026-27, Ch 5 "Natural Vegetation", kegy105.pdf.
• PIB / MoEFCC, "India's Wildlife Conservation Milestones", 3 Mar 2025, PDF (protected areas, tiger estimates, elephant reserves, Project Cheetah, Project Dolphin, IRV 2020, WPA 2022 amendment).
• All India Radio, "Modi govt moved forward based on environmentally balanced development", 10 Mar 2026, newsonair.gov.in.
• All India Radio, "Glaw lake of Arunachal Pradesh designated as 101st Ramsar site", 3 Aug 2026, newsonair.gov.in; PMIndia, 100th Ramsar site, 5 Jun 2026, pmindia.gov.in; PIB, New India Samachar, 1–15 Jul 2026, p. 42, page.
• All India Radio, "Madhav National Park has become the country's 58th Tiger Reserve", 9 Mar 2025, newsonair.gov.in.
• All India Radio, "Kuno National Park receives nine cheetahs from Botswana", 28 Feb 2026, newsonair.gov.in; DD India, "Bhupender Yadav reviews GIB conservation, grassland restoration and Project Cheetah in Gujarat", 13 Sep 2026, ddindia.co.in.
• Wildlife Institute of India, "Government of India releases the Status Reports of Snow Leopards in India", 30 Jan 2024, v1.wii.gov.in.
• WII, Status of Elephants in India: DNA based Synchronous All India Population Estimation of Elephants (SAIEE) 2021-2025, 14 Oct 2025, record at PARI library.
• UN India, "Where snow leopards roam: India's cold desert earns global recognition", 27 Sep 2025, india.un.org.
• IPBES, Global Assessment media release, 6 May 2019, ipbes.net.
• CBD Secretariat, Kunming-Montreal GBF Target 3 and Target 19.
• CEPF, "Biodiversity Hotspots Defined", accessed 1 Oct 2026.
• IUCN Red List assessments (citations; iucnredlist.org was not reachable from our environment): Goodrich et al., Panthera tigris, 2022, e.T15955A214862019; Williams et al., Elephas maximus, 2020, e.T7140A45818198; Lang, Chowfin & Ross, Gavialis gangeticus, 2019, cited in the EDGE Gharial Survival Blueprint; Kelkar et al., Platanista gangetica, July 2022, reported by the Wildlife Conservation Trust; Durant et al., Acinonyx jubatus, 2022, e.T219A124366642; Glatston et al., Ailurus fulgens, 2015; BirdLife International, Ardeotis nigriceps and Houbaropsis bengalensis (2018 assessments; BirdLife factsheet); Praschag et al., Nilssonia nigricans, 2021, cited in J. Threatened Taxa, Oct 2022; snow leopard downlisting to VU in 2017, Oryx editorial "A downlist is not a demotion" (Cambridge University Press, 2017); Lipotes vexillifer, CR (Possibly Extinct), assessed 2017.
• PIB, "Parliament Question: Wildlife and Animal Conservation Initiatives" (Rajya Sabha US Q691), 5 Feb 2026 — PIB.
• Question banks: src/_data/mains/pyq/gs1.json, gs3.json; src/_data/pyq-environment-updated.js; src/_data/prelims/2026/gs1.json.