The International Consultation on Biodiversity, Climate Change, and Adaptation concluded here on Monday, stressing the need for drawing up a new action plan on how adaptive strategies can be formulated with effective utilisation of biodiversity.
The programme was organised by the Community Agrobiodiversity Centre (CABC) of the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF) here in connection with its silver jubilee celebrations.
Addressing the concluding session, MSSRF chairperson Madhura Swaminathan said climate change was shaping biodiversity, particularly agrobiodiversity, but how agrobiodiversity was adapted to the changing climate should be studied.
Dr. Swaminathan said ex-situ conservation of agrobiodiversity taken up by farmers in their homesteads had become the testing ground and active field laboratories for the assessment of production and disease resistance in changing climatic conditions.
In a message, Prof. M.S. Swaminathan said the CABC had taken up the adventure of biodiversity conservation for the last 25 years with the active participation of communities. A holistic, ecosystem-based adaptation strategy with an orientation to natural resources had to be promoted to attain sustainability, he added.
The gap between the indigenous knowledge possessed by communities and evidence-based science should be reduced as the custodian farmers and local communities’ possessed key knowledge, said MSSRF Senior Director N. Anil Kumar.
Dr. Kumar mentioned five action areas for climate change - integrated farming systems, innovative ecosystem-based actions, incentivising climate actions, institution of grassroots and insulated adaptation practices.
“Nature-based solutions are the need of the hour, in which all development plans must have a climate risk information system that leads to reduction of climate vulnerabilities,” said Sarada Krishnan, Executive Director, International Women’s Coffee Alliance, USA.
New policies should be formulated that give due space to the importance of agrobiodiversity, said Vania Azevedo, Genebank Head, International Potato Center (CIP), Peru. Using an approach that integrated community-level in-situ conservation, and scientific techniques, the CIP had been able to successfully undertake germplasm conservation of a large number of potato varieties in Peru, said Dr. Azevedo.
