Western Ghats Hotspot Conservation Profile
 
ATREE in partnership with the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) – India Programme,
and the University of Agricultural Sciences (UAS), Bangalore has recently prepared
an Ecosystem Profile of the Western Ghats to guide investment by the Critical Ecosystem
Partnership Fund (CEPF) in this region. The CEPF is a joint initiative of Conservation
International (CI), the Global Environment Facility (GEF), the Government of Japan, the
MacArthur Foundation, and the World Bank, designed to better safeguard the world's
threatened biodiversity hotspots through the engagement of civil society in conservation.
The Western Ghats and Sri Lanka Hotspot, with its unique assemblages of plant and animal
communities and rare and endemic species, is globally important for conserving representative
areas of the Earth’s biodiversity, making it worthy of international attention and CEPF funding.
The Ecosystem Profile aims to identify areas of conservation significance, provide an
overview of the causes of biodiversity loss in the Western Ghats, describe current
institutional frameworks and investments for conservation and outline strategic directions
for CEPF investment to conserve and enhance the biological heritage of this uniquely
significant region of the world. The strategic directions outlined in the profile seek to
capitalize on the tremendous social and human resources of the region.
The Ecosystem Profile and five-year investment strategy for the Western Ghats region was
developed from an analysis of primary and secondary data, consultation with experts, and
stakeholder workshops. Definition of targets for achieving quantifiable, justifiable and
globally consistent conservation outcomes constitutes a critical component of the profile.
They represent the scientific basis for determining CEPF’s geographic and thematic focus
in the Western Ghats. Conservation targets were defined at three scales - species, sites
and landscapes - in cooperation with scientists at Conservation International’s Center
for Applied Biodiversity Science (CABS). A prioritization exercise was then conducted by
ATREE using criteria such as number of endemic and restricted range species occurrences,
presence of unique ecosystems and unfragmented forest area to identify high conservation
value sites for CEPF investment.
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