ABSTRACT
Historically, botanical gardens play a critical role in ensuring the global goals of biodiversity conservation, food security, environmental sustainability, and human well-being. Traditional strengths of botanic gardens to achieve these goals include scientific management of living collections ex situ along with the voucher herbarium collections of key plant species, in addition to regular interactions with the general public on various aspects of conservation. In addition to hosting visitors on-site and providing education, it is critical that botanic gardens become active beyond the garden walls and species/taxa boundaries and engage in social and environmental activities at the ecosystem level in partnership with the local community to address, in particular, the challenges of global climate change and achieve locally the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN-SDGs). Mitigating the loss of biodiversity and improving ecosystem services has been addressed in various international and national agendas, such as the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation and the Aichi Biodiversity Targets, with emphasis on integration of ex situ and in situ conservation approaches. However, current strategies and conservation actions have not been proven enough to prevent or slow down the pace of decline of biodiversity and ecosystem services, especially in the global south. This chapter highlights the actions taken at a local scale in partnership with a local community by the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF)’s Botanical Garden in India in the world’s most densely populated global biodiversity hot spot, the Western Ghats. The strategic actions that help active involvement of ordinary men and women as well as their representative institutions and integrating the conventional ex situ approach with in situ and community conservation methods are described. We address the question of how local and regional botanic gardens can help build a better future for biodiversity conservation that not only arrests the rapid loss of diversity at the level of species and varieties but also restores and improves the resilience of ecosystems against many climate shocks while improving the local food and nutrition security.
