KATHMANDU — Eminent Nepali conservation groups and environmentalists have called on the country’s Supreme Court to repeal a recently enacted law that opens up conservation areas to private infrastructure.

The Nepal National Committee of the global conservation authority IUCN said it fears the law, which authorizes the government to approve infrastructure projects within protected areas, may serve vested interests, at the cost of the country’s hard-earned achievements.

“If desired, the government can [use the legislation to] allow projects such as hydropower plants, cable cars, hotels, roads, and railways within these [protected] areas, overriding conservation priorities,” the committee representing 27 organizations that have been working in conservation for decades said in a statement. “This raises concerns that natural resources and wildlife may be exploited, while local communities dependent on these resources for their livelihoods may suffer,” it added.

In April this year, Nepal’s government introduced an ordinance to amend a host of laws including the National Parks and Wildlife Conservation Act to “improve the investment climate” in the country ahead of the international investment summit (April 28-29).

The law, which was approved by parliament in July, authorizes the government to declare an area within a protected area as falling outside of “highly sensitive” zones, and it allows the construction of different types of infrastructure outside the highly sensitive areas. The Supreme Court issued an interim stay on the new amendment following a petition filed by lawyer Dil Raj Khanal and his team.

“National parks and reserves are inherently sensitive areas,” said World Commission on Environmental Law Nepal focal person Ravi Sharma Aryal. “The recent amendments would effectively shrink the protected areas, allowing destructive development projects under the guise of progress, thereby undermining conservation efforts and posing a significant threat to the environment,” he added.

In January, a few months before rolling out the ordinance, the government introduced a set of procedures on the “Construction of Physical Infrastructure Inside Protected Areas,” opening up conservation areas for hydropower development. Rivers inside protected areas that had been off-limits to hydropower were opened for hydropower generation Before the procedure was introduced, there was a ban on the development of any power project that occupies an area entirely within a national park or a protected area.

Nepal is home to a dozen national parks, a wildlife reserve, a hunting reserve, six conservation areas and 13 buffer zones. These are dotted across the breadth of the country, from the lowland Terai Arc (the home of the Bengal tigers, Panthera tigris) to the high Himalayas, covering nearly a quarter of the country’s total land area. Although local people were displaced to establish national parks in the southern lowlands, people continue to live inside some national parks and conservation areas, such as Sagarmatha (Everest), Langtang and Annapurna. However, certain restrictions on felling of trees, use of natural resources and building of infrastructure remain.

The national committee pointed out that even as the matter is of utmost importance to the conservation sector, the government didn’t consult stakeholders during the law’s drafting process. A former director-general at the Department of National Parks and Wildlife Conservation said he was unaware of such big changes, as they were hidden inside an ordinance with a seemingly innocuous cause of improving conditions for foreign investment.

As the court examines the validity of the new law, an unexpected turn of events has shaken the Department of National Parks and Wildlife Conservation. Sindhu Prasad Dhungana, department director-general, was transferred to the Ministry of Forests and Environment with just two months remaining in his tenure. Normally, bureaucrats in Nepal aren’t transferred to new positions if they have less than a year left before retirement. Some analysts have connected the transfer to the court case, while others say the change was made because the minister and the director-general had “incompatible” political views.

At a public event organized on the last day of his office, Dhungana, who refrained from talking about his transfer, did talk about balancing biodiversity conservation with infrastructure development. Dhungana hinted that the government was working on a new single guideline for the operation of protected areas in Nepal. Currently, each protected area is administered under its own separate guideline.

A draft of the new guideline, seen by Mongabay, proposes further measures to implement zoning measures and to allow infrastructure such as hotels, roads, canals and railway lines to be built inside protected areas.

A conservationist, who didn’t want to be named as he was not authorized to talk to the media, told Mongabay that the government could propose that the zonating measures be applied only to protected areas in the mountains and not in the plains, where people have been evicted from their homes to create the national parks. “That would make more sense, as people continue to lead a life of hardship in the mountains and they also need to reap the benefits of development,” the conservationist said.

Banner image: A vehicle stands in front of a gate outside Chitwan National Park. Image by Abhaya Raj Joshi

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In Nepal, conservation battles head to Supreme Court amid civil society silence

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Abhayarajjoshi Editor

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