This World Forest Day, India must rethink how it governs its resources

As India marks World Forest Day on March 21, the conversation around forests often returns to familiar themes — conservation, tree cover and biodiversity. But the real question is larger: Are we even governing forests in a way that reflects what they actually do?

Because forests are not just about trees. They regulate water systems, recharge groundwater, stabilise soils, support agriculture, store carbon and sustain livelihoods. Yet, in policy and practice, forests continue to be treated as a standalone sector — managed separately from mining, infrastructure, water and energy decisions that directly shape their future.
This disconnect is becoming increasingly visible.

India is moving rapidly on development. Critical minerals such as lithium and rare earths are being fast-tracked. Large infrastructure projects are expanding into ecologically sensitive regions. Environmental procedures are being streamlined in the name of efficiency.

But the way resources are governed has not kept pace. Take the Great Nicobar Island. The proposed mega-development project — including a transshipment port, airport, township and power infrastructure — is being presented as a strategic necessity. Yet the island is one of India's most fragile ecological systems, where forests, coasts, freshwater systems and biodiversity are tightly interlinked. The concern is not just about forest loss. It is about how altering one part of the system could reshape the entire island — with consequences that are difficult to reverse.
A similar pattern is visible elsewhere.

In the Aravalli Range, mining pressures are often framed as a conservation issue. But the Aravallis are also critical groundwater recharge zones that support agriculture and urban water supply across north India. When these hills are degraded, the impacts extend far beyond the mining site — affecting water availability, soil stability and energy use for groundwater extraction.

In central India, the forests of Hasdeo Arand highlight another dimension. Coal mining here is often justified in terms of energy needs. But these forests regulate local climate, sustain river systems and support the livelihoods and food security of Adivasi communities. Fragmenting them is not just a forest issue — it is a disruption of an entire socio-ecological system.

What links these cases is not just environmental concern. It is a deeper issue in how decisions are made.

A 2023 review by researchers from the National Institute of Hydrology, Roorkee and the International Water Management Institute, covering more than forty government programmes across water, energy, agriculture and ecosystems, found that India's policies are largely designed in silos. As a result, actions in one sector often create unintended consequences in others, making resource use inefficient and, in many cases, unsustainable (Jain et al., 2023).

At its core, this is a failure to recognise that natural resources are interconnected. Water supports agriculture and energy. Forests regulate water flows and climate. Energy production depends on both land and water. Ecosystems underpin all of these. When one part is altered — whether through mining, infrastructure or land-use change — the effects ripple across the system.

This way of understanding resources — as interconnected rather than isolated — is often described as a resource nexus approach. It simply means that decisions should account for these linkages from the outset, instead of treating impacts as afterthoughts.

In India, this approach remains largely absent in practice. Environmental Impact Assessments are still mostly project-specific and rarely capture cumulative impacts. Mining and infrastructure decisions are taken within sectoral boundaries. Even strong legal protections for forests and communities are often weakened when projects are framed as nationally important.

Recent policy trends reinforce this concern. Efforts to streamline environmental clearances and shift towards compliance-based systems aim to improve efficiency. But without understanding how decisions interact across sectors, faster approvals can also mean faster accumulation of hidden ecological and social costs.

The risks are no longer local. Climate change is tightening the links between water, food and energy systems. Erratic rainfall, more frequent floods and droughts, and declining ecosystem resilience are amplifying vulnerabilities across sectors. Governing resources in isolation, in such a context, does not just create environmental damage — it undermines long-term economic stability.
India's development challenge today is not a lack of ambition. It is a lack of integration.

When irrigation expands without accounting for groundwater limits, water tables fall. When cheap energy supports agriculture without regulation, extraction intensifies. When forests are diverted without understanding their role in water systems, both ecosystems and livelihoods suffer. Each decision may make sense within its own sector. Together, they create systemic stress.

On World Forest Day, this is worth recognising. Protecting forests cannot be limited to counting trees or expanding cover. It requires rethinking how forests are embedded within wider resource systems — and how decisions in mining, energy, water and infrastructure shape their future.

The scale of development today — from critical mineral extraction to projects like Great Nicobar — makes this shift urgent. These are not isolated interventions. They are transformations of entire landscapes.
What is needed is not more regulation, but better-connected regulation.
A resource nexus approach does not oppose development. It strengthens it by making trade-offs visible, by forcing long-term thinking, and by recognising that ecological systems are the foundation of economic systems — not separate from them.

India does not lack environmental laws. What it lacks is a way to make them work together.

As long as resources are governed in fragments, conflicts like Aravalli, Hasdeo and Great Nicobar will continue to emerge — each treated as an isolated issue, even though they are part of the same pattern.
On World Forest Day, the question is not only how to protect forests.
It is whether India is ready to govern its resources as interconnected systems — before the costs of ignoring them become irreversible.

Asha Verma works at the United Nations University Institute for Integrated Management of Material Fluxes and of Resources (UNU-FLORES), focusing on the Resource Nexus approach in research and education. Views expressed are the author’s own and don’t necessarily reflect those of Down To Earth.