Are our leaders awaiting a vaccine for the environment?

COVID-19 has negatively affected not just laws, but has given rise to job losses among protected area rangers, and reduced anti-poaching patrols and environmental protection rollbacks

If one were to look at the environmental implications of the coronavirus pandemic, the list is rather exhausting. It first started with everyone celebrating lowered pollution levels and wildlife thriving sans humans interfering in their habitats. Then came the masks and PPE suits bringing with them a snowballing plastic and medical waste crisis. A year into the pandemic, and what we are now learning is that the crisis has significantly impacted not just humans but also nature conservation efforts across the globe. A collection of new research papers published by International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) in a special issue of PARKS, the journal of the IUCN World Commission on Protected Areas, states that COVID-19 has negatively affected not just laws, but has given rise to job losses among protected area rangers, and reduced anti-poaching patrols and environmental protection rollbacks. The paper finds that conservation efforts in Africa and Asia were most severely affected, which comes as no surprise at least for India, where 2020 saw a number of laws and policies — that adversely impacted the environment — come into play. Projects, including and not limited to a highway construction through Goa’s Mollem Wildlife Sanctuary, a Nagpur-Mumbai superhighway that will need over 32,000 trees to be felled for the proposed design, and a slew of mining projects were cleared via video conferencing by April 2020. These were followed by the much-discussed draft Environment Impact Assessment (EIA) notification 2020 (set to replace the EIA notification 2006) that doesn’t require public hearings for certain projects, eases project expansion, and makes way for legal loopholes, among many other drawbacks. The paper (for India) cited 31 infrastructure proposals for national parks and sanctuaries, extraction and development projects, including coal mining.