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India launched its first-ever Guide to Grasslands and Other Open Natural Ecosystems (ONEs) of India on 17 August 2026.
The launch took place at a side event of UNCCD COP17 in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, held under the guidance of the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change.
The publication was brought out by ATREE with IUCN, the Centre of Excellence on Sustainable Land Management, ICFRE and ISRO's Space Applications Centre.
It maps India's grasslands, savannas, deserts, scrublands, rocky plateaus, ravines and coastal open ecosystems, with chapters on pastoralism, fire ecology and carbon sequestration.
The guide argues that conservation policy built around forests alone leaves open ecosystems — and the pastoral livelihoods that depend on them — unprotected.
The UNCCD target under SDG 15.3; India's LDN commitment is to restore 26 million hectares of degraded land by 2030, and open ecosystems are a large share of the land in question.
India hosted COP14, where the Delhi Declaration was adopted and the restoration target was raised from 21 to 26 million hectares.
Asia's largest tropical grassland and the home of the Maldhari pastoralists — a textbook case of an open ecosystem with a pastoral economy built on it.
Observed on 17 June, marking the adoption of the UNCCD in 1994.
GS Paper 3 > Environment > Conservation and international conventions
General Awareness > Environment and international organisations
General Awareness > Current Affairs
Non-forest natural ecosystems — grasslands, savannas, scrub, rocky plateaus, ravines and deserts — often misclassified as wasteland in Indian land records
United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification, adopted in 1994, headquartered at Bonn, with 197 Parties; the only legally binding agreement on land degradation and drought
A state in which the amount of healthy and productive land resources remains stable or increases; tied to SDG target 15.3
Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment, a Bengaluru-based environmental research organisation