Mapping of two Western Ghats districts shows much of proposed ESA overlaps with Notified Forests, Protected Areas, or existing ESZs
A citizen-led initiative has mapped proposed Ecologically Sensitive Areas (ESA) in Karnataka's Kodagu and Udupi districts. The report highlights that a significant portion of the proposed ESA overlaps with existing protected forests, while questioning the exclusion of key community-focused recommendations from the original Kasturirangan Committee report.
Why it matters
This analysis provides critical data for the ongoing debate between environmental conservation efforts and local administrative autonomy in the Western Ghats.
Amid cacophony surrounding the Western Ghats and the measures that have been proposed to conserve it, Paani Earth Foundation, a citizen-led initiative, has broken down the Centre’s draft notification on the proposed Ecologically Sensitive Area (ESA) in the Western Ghats.
The foundation zoomed into two districts, Kodagu and Udupi, and mapped the proposed ESA villages using the spatial layers for administrative boundaries from Karnataka Geographical Information System (KGIS) to understand them in the context of the landscape and existing legal protection layers.
This comes even as the Karnataka legislature, on September 22, unanimously passed a resolution rejecting the K. Kasturirangan Committee report on the Western Ghats in its current form in response to the draft published on July 27.
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