Natural spaces

Threats to demographic development  

Across the Asian continent, 5,000 km2 of wetlands disappear each year, representing 5% of India's territory, but sheltering more than a quarter of the country's biodiversity. Lakes, marshes and lagoons face human pressure and increasing demographic development:

• urbanization pressure on water resources

• land transformation

• agricultural and industrial pollution

This requires a real conservation policy.

The wetlands and also in the forests and its hundred-year-old trees, which were spaces dedicated to the gods and which require the construction of temples, thus resorting to deforestation.

However, the situation remains reversible according to Raphaël Mathevet, ecologist and geographer at the French Institute of Pondicherry (IFP). The institute is carrying out the research necessary to respond to this problem, in particular by referencing the large list of plant species which constitutes the richness of the Indian flora (with already more than 5,000 species spread over nearly 30,000 pages).