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Economic Valuation: Making the Invisible Visible
“Any conversation on conservation cannot be delinked
from livelihoods, belief systems or mobility patterns.”
From a policy perspective, Chandra Taal is a “critical test case for framing conser
vation in fragile Alpine systems”. Despite its designation as a Ramsar site, Arghya
notes that “designation alone doesn’t protect it”; it requires active, on-ground
management. His work with Wetlands International involves implementing an
“integrated management plan” (prepared with the State Forest Department of
Himachal Pradesh), a comprehensive strategy. This plan rigorously “ties ecologi
cal monitoring with tourist regulation, catchment, level planning and community
stewardship”, demonstrating a multifaceted approach. Ultimately, Chandra Taal
matters because it sits at the “intersection of biodiversity, climate, resilience,
and sociocultural continuity”. It profoundly “challenges us to think of wetlands,
not as isolated systems or isolated units, but as living systems embedded in
people and politics”.
Arghya’s research into the economic evaluation of biodiversity and ecosystem
services reveals an often unsettling paradox: “how persistently invisible many
ecosystem services remain in decision making even today”. Despite the avail
ability of sophisticated tools to assign economic value, directly and indirect
ly, a significant portion of nature’s contributions often “fall through the cracks,
especially in developmental planning”. This critical oversight incurs long-term
ecological and societal costs. He notes that easily monetized “provisioning ser
vices, such as tourism,” tend to be readily accounted for. In stark contrast, vital
“regulating services like flood buffering” frequently go unvalued, leading to crit
ical blind spots in policy and investment decisions.
A particularly “striking insight” from his work has been the pervasive under
valuation of “cultural and relational values, especially in indigenous and local
contexts”. In the wetlands and forest landscapes where he conducts his field
work, communities relate to ecosystems not merely as a “natural capital” to be
exploited or quantified, but as “teachers, or spiritual entities”. These deep, in
trinsic relationships form the fabric of human-nature coexistence and are inher
ently complex. They “don’t translate easily into rupees or dollars”. The attempt
to force these underlying connections into purely monetary terms often serves
to “flatten their significance”, reducing a multidimensional bond to a simplistic
transaction.