Environment › Conservation initiatives
Afforestation, restoration and conservation outside protected areas
Planting and restoration, and conservation outside notified parks: the national afforestation schemes and green credits, trees outside forests, community and other conserved areas, corridors, and the nature of cities. Prelims has asked about the aim of the Green India Mission.
UPSC has asked
- Prelims 2014: conserving biodiversity together with traditional human life
Showing 1 of 5 subjects, those that changed from 1 to 15 August 2026.Show all
Other Effective Area-based Conservation Measures
Copy link to Other Effective Area-based Conservation MeasuresPrelims and Mains
An OECM is the name for land that lies outside the formal protected area network and still conserves biodiversity in situ over the long term, which is how conservation is counted once it stops at no boundary.
- An OECM counts whoever owns the land, which is what separates it from a notified protected area.
- OECMs count towards Target 3 of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, adopted under the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), which is the 30x30 pledge.
Protected areas
- National parks and sanctuaries already notified by the State
OECMs
- Community forests, wetlands and other biodiversity rich land outside parks
- Recognised under the Convention on Biological Diversity
Ecological corridors
- Strips of habitat that let animals move between protected areas
What changed
3 Aug 2026
3 Aug 2026
- An August column argued that India should hold one conservation estate, in which corridors and community land count towards the pledge as well as notified parks.
- Wildlife overpasses on the Delhi Dehradun Economic Corridor and mitigation in the Pench Seoni landscape were offered as proof that infrastructure and connectivity can coexist.
Also filed elsewhere
- Open natural ecosystems · on Forests, grasslands and mountain ecosystems
India's open natural ecosystems, its grasslands, savannas, scrub, ravines and deserts, are still recorded in many places as wastelands, and lose out in land use decisions accordingly.