The Shencottah gap has been recognised as one of the critical wildlife corridors that needs to be immediately restored to ensure long term sustenance of wildlife populations in the Periyar-Agastyamalai complex. It has also been acknowledged that critical wildlife corridors are likely to pass through productive human landscapes, thus necessitating involvement of local communities and individuals in restoring and maintaining connectivity. While both these facts have been debated and discussed in various national forums there has hardly been any effort to empirically identify critical links in the Shencottah gap and to develop viable mechanisms to involve local communities in conserving or restoring these linkages. The goal of the present project is to demonstrate that biodiversity can be restored, without land purchase, using a a Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES) approach in areas like the Shencottah gap which contain several private holdings, and to establish protocols in using this novel mechanism for wildlife conservation.
Primary components of the project are to
a. Develop mechanisms to make payments to conserve biodiversity
b. Establish baseline data and a monitoring system which will link payments and measure the success of PES.
Srinivas Vaidyanathan