Prakash Javadekar, the Environment, Forest and Climate Change Minister has recently released the Management Effectiveness Evaluation (MEE) report. The MEE report includes the evaluation of 146 National Park and Wildlife Sanctuaries in India.
Key Points
- As per MEE, currently, India has a network of 903 Protected Areas (PAs) that covers around 5 percent of the total geographic area of the country.
- At present, India has 70% of the global tiger population, more than 60% of the leopard population, and 70% of Asiatic lions. These numbers show that India has thriving biodiversity.
- Management Effectiveness Evaluation (MEE) of Protected Areas has come out as a major tool for the managers of these areas.
- MEE is also being widely used by governments and international bodies to examine the strengths and weaknesses of the protected area management systems.
- With the release of this MEE, one full cycle of evaluating all terrestrial National Parks and Wildlife Sanctuaries in India from the year 2006 to 2019 has been completed by the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC).
- The results of the current MEE are good and encouraging with an overall mean MEE score of 62.01%. This score is higher than the global mean of 56%.
- A new framework for MEE of Marine Protected Areas has also been prepared jointly by MoEF&CC and Wildlife Institute of India (WII).
- During the release of MEE, the minister announced that from 2021 onwards 10 best National Parks, top five Zoos, 5 coastal and Marine parks in the country will be ranked and awarded annually.
MEE-ZOO
The Environment Minister also launched the MEE-ZOO (Management Effectiveness Evaluation of Indian Zoos) framework in this event. The framework will provide guidelines, indicators, and criteria for the evaluation of zoos in the country.
