IWN Report — Monday, 24 August 2026

India has published its first dedicated guide to the grasslands, deserts, ravines and scrublands that government paperwork has spent decades filing under “wasteland.”

The Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change launched the Guide to Grasslands and Other Open Natural Ecosystems of India on 17 August, at a side event of the UNCCD’s COP17 summit in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia.

Environment Minister Bhupender Yadav addressed the launch by video message, in which he said said grasslands, scrublands and ravines “have for too long been judged by the absence of trees,” despite sheltering species found nowhere else and sustaining pastoral communities across the country.

The subject is personal for him. Yadav grew up in Ajmer, Rajasthan, surrounded by grazing lands and desert scrub that locals called wasteland, and he pointed to the Oran and gauchar landscapes that villages had protected long before any ministry took an interest.

Not wasteland

The Guide was produced by the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE), working with the International Union for Conservation of Nature, the Centre of Excellence on Sustainable Land Management, the Indian Council of Forestry Research and Education, and the Space Applications Centre of ISRO. It maps ecosystem types running from Himalayan and Terai grasslands down to the Thar Desert and the Banni grasslands of Kutch, Gujarat, and on to Deccan savannas, rocky plateaus, ravines and coastal scrub.

Alongside the geography, the Guide carries sections on pastoralism, fire ecology and carbon storage, framing these landscapes as part of India’s Land Degradation Neutrality targets rather than land waiting to be planted with trees. Two fireside chats at the launch covered rangeland governance and dryland restoration.

ATREE coined the term Open Natural Ecosystems for exactly this kind of land, and has separately mapped it across the country. By the organisation’s own count, these habitats cover more than a tenth of India’s land area, yet less than 5% of them sit inside a protected area. ATREE lists the Indian grey wolf, the striped hyena and the Indian gazelle among the species that depend on them, alongside grassland birds such as the Great Indian Bustard, the Lesser Florican and the Indian Courser.

Sources: Press Information Bureau · Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment