Sustainable Management of Natural Resources

Introduction

Natural resources are substances we take from the planet to sustain life and meet human needs. A natural resource is simply something that comes from nature and that people use. Forests, wildlife, coal, petroleum, stone, sand, metals, oil and natural gas are all natural resources. So are air, sunlight, soil and water.

Human wellbeing depends completely on these resources. We cannot survive without the fresh water we drink, the plants we eat or the clean air we breathe. To build a roof over our heads and to warm our homes, we need natural resources. Because these resources are limited, managing them wisely is one of the central problems of our age. This topic sits inside the wider study of how people and the planet share a common home, which you can explore further on the Learnacy Hub.

The problem of a shared resource: pollution of the Ganga

A river shows very clearly what happens when a shared resource is misused.

• The river Ganga, whose course runs about 2,500 km, is used as a sewage dump by more than a hundred cities across Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and West Bengal.
• Dumping untreated sewage, human waste and industrial chemicals raises the toxicity of the water and makes the river unfit for the plants and animals that live in it.
• In 1985 the Ganga Action Plan (GAP) was launched to improve the poor quality of the water.
• The Namami Gange Programme is an integrated conservation mission approved as a flagship programme by the Union Government in 2014. It aims both to reduce pollution and to conserve and rejuvenate the river. The National Mission for Clean Ganga, set up in October 2016, is its implementation wing.

One way scientists check whether water is contaminated is by testing for coliform, a group of bacteria found in the human intestine. Its presence in water is a warning sign of contamination by disease causing microorganisms.

The five R's to save the environment

Before we recycle, there are cheaper and better habits. The five R's are Refuse, Reduce, Reuse, Repurpose and Recycle.

• Refuse: say no to things you do not need, and refuse products that harm you or the environment, such as single use plastic carry bags.
• Reduce: use less. Switch off unnecessary lights and fans to save electricity, repair leaky taps to save water, and do not waste food.
• Reuse: often better than recycling, because recycling itself uses energy. Use things again and again. A used envelope can be reversed and used once more, and empty jam or pickle bottles can store things in the kitchen.
• Repurpose: when a product can no longer serve its original purpose, find a new use for it. Cracked crockery or a cup with a broken handle can hold a small plant or feed birds.
• Recycle: collect plastic, paper, glass and metal, and recycle them rather than making fresh material. Recycling first needs us to segregate our waste so that recyclable material is not dumped with the rest.

Even our everyday choices can be made environment friendly once we understand how those choices affect the world, whether the effects are immediate or long lasting. The idea of sustainable development is growth that meets today's basic human needs while preserving resources for the needs of future generations. It links economic development to environmental conservation, and it asks each of us to change how we think about the world around us and how we use what nature provides.

Why do we need to manage our resources?

Almost everything we use or consume, our food, clothes, books, toys, furniture, tools and vehicles, comes from the resources of this earth. The only thing we receive from outside is energy from the Sun, and even that is processed by living organisms and by physical and chemical processes on the earth before we use it.

Why use resources carefully?

• Resources are not unlimited, and as the human population grows quickly because of better health care, demand for every resource rises steeply.
• Managing resources needs a long term view so that they last for the generations to come, rather than being exploited fully for short term gain.
• Management must ensure fair distribution, so that everyone benefits and not just a handful of rich and powerful people.
• We must also count the damage done to the environment when resources are extracted or used. Mining, for example, causes pollution because of the large amount of slag discarded for every tonne of metal. Sustainable management therefore has to plan for the safe disposal of such waste too.

Today's global concern for sustainability is recent when set against India's long tradition of nature conservation. Principles of conservation and sustainable use were well established in ancient India, and our old literature is full of examples where respect for nature and the idea of sustainability were held up as values. During the Vedic period both the productive and the protective sides of forests were valued, and practices such as sacred groves and a variety of traditional forestry customs grew out of that culture.

Forests and wildlife

• Forests are biodiversity hotspots.
• One measure of the biodiversity of an area is the number of species found there. The range of different life forms, from bacteria, fungi and ferns to flowering plants, insects, birds and reptiles, also matters.
• A main aim of conservation is to preserve the biodiversity we have inherited.
• Experiments and field studies suggest that a loss of diversity may lead to a loss of ecological stability.

Stakeholders

We all use forest produce, but our dependence differs. Some of us have alternatives and some do not. When we think about conserving forests we need to look at four sets of stakeholders.

1. People who live in or around forests. They depend on forest produce for firewood, small timber and thatch. Bamboo becomes slats for huts and baskets for food. Tools for farming, fishing and hunting are largely made of wood, and their cattle graze in or feed on fodder from the forest.
2. The Forest Department of the Government, which owns the land and controls its resources. After independence the department carried on the British approach and often ignored local knowledge and needs. Large tracts were turned into single species plantations of pine, teak or eucalyptus, which destroyed biodiversity and could no longer meet the varied needs of local people, although they suited industry and earned revenue.
3. Industrialists, from those who use tendu leaves for bidis to owners of paper mills. They use forest produce but are not tied to any one forest, so they have little interest in the long term health of a particular area. After clearing the teak in one place they simply move to another.
4. Wildlife and nature enthusiasts, who want to conserve nature in its natural form. They are not dependent on forests but often have a strong say in how forests are managed. At first they focused on large animals such as lions, tigers, elephants and rhinoceros, but they now recognise the need to preserve biodiversity as a whole.

Should people be seen as part of the forest?

There are many examples of local communities working for conservation. The Bishnois of western Rajasthan, on the edge of the Thar desert, have made the protection of forests and wildlife a religious duty and have conserved flora and fauna for centuries, even at the cost of their own lives. In their memory the Government of India instituted the Amrita Devi Bishnoi National Award for Wildlife Conservation, named after Amrita Devi Bishnoi, who in 1731 gave her life along with 363 others to protect the khejri trees of Khejrali village near Jodhpur.

Keeping people out is not always the answer either. In the Great Himalayan National Park, alpine meadows were grazed by sheep brought up from the valleys each summer. When the park was formed and grazing stopped, the grass grew tall, fell over and prevented fresh growth. Managing protected areas by force, or by shutting local people out, rarely succeeds in the long run. The damage to forests cannot be blamed on local people alone, since deforestation for industry, roads, dams and even tourism also takes a heavy toll. Human presence has always been part of the forest landscape, so forest resources should be used in a way that is both environmentally and developmentally sound, letting conservation and decentralised economic growth go together.

Management of forests: movements and models

Forest resources have often been handed to industry far below market value while being denied to local people. Two Indian stories show what changes when people are included.

The Chipko Andolan, or Hug the Trees Movement, grew from a grassroots effort in the remote village of Reni in Garhwal, high in the Himalayas, in the early 1970s. A logging contractor had been allowed to fell trees near the village. One day, while the men were away, the contractor's workers arrived, and the women of the village reached the forest and clasped the tree trunks, so the workers could not cut them and the contractor had to withdraw. Communities that traditionally lop branches and pluck leaves let the resource replenish over time. The movement spread quickly and forced the government to rethink how forest produce is used. The destruction of forests had affected not only forest products but also the quality of the soil and the sources of water.

Local participation can indeed manage forests well. In 1972 the West Bengal Forest Department admitted it had failed to revive the degraded Sal forests of the state's south western districts, where policing had alienated people and fuelled conflict. At the insistence of a far seeing forest officer, A. K. Banerjee, villagers in the Arabari range of Midnapore were involved in protecting 1,272 hectares of badly degraded Sal forest. In return they were given work in silviculture and harvesting, a quarter of the final harvest, and the right to collect fuelwood and fodder for a small fee. With this active participation the Arabari forest recovered so well that by 1983 a once worthless forest was valued at about 12.5 crore rupees.

Water for all

Water is a basic necessity for all life on land.

• A study of rainfall alone does not explain water availability across India, because most rain falls in the few months of the monsoon.
• Despite this monsoon bounty, the failure to keep water stored underground has come largely from the loss of vegetation, the diversion of water to thirsty crops, and pollution from industrial effluents and urban waste.
• Irrigation through dams, tanks and canals has been used across India since ancient times. These were usually local systems, managed by local people, that met the basic needs of both farming and daily life throughout the year.
• The use of stored water was carefully regulated, and cropping patterns were matched to the water available, based on generations of experience.
• British rule changed this. Large dams and long canals were first planned then, and were carried forward with equal energy after independence. These mega projects led to the neglect of local irrigation and shifted control away from local people.

Dams

Why do we build dams?

• Large dams can store enough water not only for irrigation but also for generating electricity, and canals can carry that water over long distances. The Indira Gandhi Canal, for instance, has brought greenery to large parts of Rajasthan.
• However, poor management of the water has let a few people corner the benefits.
• Distribution is often unfair, so people near the source grow water hungry crops such as sugarcane and rice while those farther downstream get very little.
• Add to this the discontent of people displaced by a dam and its canals, and you have the reasons behind opposition to large dams such as the Tehri Dam on the Ganga and the Narmada Bachao Andolan, the Save the Narmada Movement, which questioned raising the height of the Sardar Sarovar Dam on the Narmada.

Criticism of large dams focuses on three problems.

1. Social problems, because dams displace large numbers of farmers and tribal people without proper compensation or rehabilitation.
2. Economic problems, because they use up huge sums of public money without producing matching benefits.
3. Environmental problems, because they cause heavy deforestation and a loss of biological diversity. The people displaced are largely poor tribals who gain nothing from the projects. The oustees of the Tawa Dam, built in the 1970s, are still fighting for the benefits they were promised.

Water harvesting

• Watershed management stresses scientific soil and water conservation in order to increase the growth of biomass.
• Its aim is to develop the primary resources of land and water so as to produce secondary resources of plants and animals, without causing ecological imbalance.
• It raises the production and income of the watershed community, and it also softens droughts and floods and extends the life of downstream dams and reservoirs.

Many organisations have revived ancient water harvesting as an alternative to mega projects. Communities have used hundreds of indigenous methods to capture every trickle that falls on their land: small pits and lakes, simple watershed systems, earthen dams, dykes, sand and limestone reservoirs, and rooftop collection units. These recharge groundwater and have even brought rivers back to life. Water harvesting is an age old idea in India, with local names in almost every region:

• Khadins, tanks and nadis in Rajasthan
• Bandharas and tals in Maharashtra
• Bundhis in Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh
• Ahars and pynes in Bihar
• Kulhs in Himachal Pradesh
• Ponds in the Kandi belt of the Jammu region
• Eris, or tanks, in Tamil Nadu
• Surangams in Kerala
• Kattas in Karnataka

These techniques are highly local, and so are their benefits. Giving people control over their own water reduces mismanagement and over use. In level country the structures are usually crescent shaped earthen embankments or low check dams built across seasonally flooded gullies. Monsoon rains fill ponds behind them, and while only the largest hold water all year, their real purpose is not to store surface water but to recharge the groundwater beneath. Groundwater does not evaporate, it spreads out to recharge wells and moisten a wide area, it does not breed mosquitoes the way stagnant ponds do, and it stays relatively safe from contamination by human and animal waste.

The main advantages of a rainwater harvesting system are:

• It reduces the need to import water.
• It encourages both energy and water conservation.
• It increases the amount and the quality of groundwater.
• Water for garden irrigation needs no filtering system.
• The technology is simple and easy to install and use.

Coal and petroleum

• Fossil fuels, that is coal and petroleum, are major sources of energy for us.
• Since the industrial revolution we have used ever more energy to meet basic needs and to manufacture the many goods our lives depend on, and these needs have been met largely by coal and petroleum.
• Coal and petroleum formed from the breakdown of biomass millions of years ago, so they will be used up in the future no matter how carefully we use them, which is why we must look for alternative sources of energy.
• It is estimated that known petroleum reserves will last about forty years and coal reserves about two hundred years.
• Because they formed from biomass, coal and petroleum contain not only carbon but also hydrogen, nitrogen and sulphur.
• When they burn, the products are carbon dioxide, water, oxides of nitrogen and oxides of sulphur. If there is not enough air, carbon monoxide forms instead of carbon dioxide. The oxides of sulphur and nitrogen and carbon monoxide are poisonous at high concentrations, and carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas.
• Coal and petroleum are huge stores of carbon. If all of that carbon turns into carbon dioxide, the amount in the atmosphere will rise and drive intense global warming, so we must use these fuels wisely.

Simple choices change our energy use. It is worth weighing the advantages, disadvantages and friendliness to the environment of each of the following:

• Taking a bus, using a personal vehicle, or walking and cycling.
• Using LED bulbs or fluorescent tubes at home.
• Using the lift or taking the stairs.
• Wearing an extra sweater or switching on a heater on a cold day.

Managing coal and petroleum also means improving the efficiency of our machines. Fuel is most often burned in the internal combustion engines used for transport, and current research aims at complete combustion in these engines, both to raise efficiency and to cut air pollution.

An overview of natural resource management

• Our resources, forests, wildlife, water, coal and petroleum, all need to be used in a sustainable way, and this is a genuinely difficult task.
• To do it we must keep the interests of every stakeholder in mind, and accept that people will usually act in their own best interest first.
• Beyond laws, rules and regulations, we need to shape our own needs, both as individuals and together, so that the benefits of development reach everyone, now and for all the generations to come.

Why it still matters

This chapter can feel like history, full of movements from the 1970s and awards named after events from 1731. It is not history. The same three questions run through India's newest official reports: how much of a resource is left, who gets it, and what happens to the next generation. Two government assessments released after this chapter was written show that the debate is very much alive.

Take forests. In December 2024 the Forest Survey of India released the India State of Forest Report 2023. It found that forest and tree cover together now make up 25.17 per cent of the country's geographical area, and that this cover grew by about 1,445 square kilometres since the 2021 assessment. That is real progress, yet 25 per cent is still far from the roughly one third of land that India's own National Forest Policy has long treated as the goal, and most of the recent gain came from tree cover outside forests rather than from dense forest. The stakeholder tug of war you read about, between local people, the Forest Department, industry and conservationists, is exactly what decides whether that number keeps rising.

Now take water. In its Dynamic Ground Water Resource Assessment for 2024, the Central Ground Water Board under the Ministry of Jal Shakti reported that India as a whole withdraws about 60 per cent of the groundwater it can replenish each year. That national average sounds safe, but about one in nine assessment blocks is already classed as over exploited, meaning people are pumping out more water than the rain puts back, and most of these blocks are clustered in Punjab, Haryana, western Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan and parts of the south. This is the modern face of the old lesson in this chapter: the humble khadin and eri were not quaint traditions, they were a way of recharging the ground before the well ran dry.

So when you revise the five R's or the story of Arabari, you are not just learning for an exam. You are learning the logic behind India's live decisions about rivers, forests and aquifers. If you want to see how a single topic like this connects to real world data and careers, the Class 10 Science notes and the wider study resources are a good next step.

Sources

1. India State of Forest Report 2023, Forest Survey of India, released 21 December 2024: https://www.newsonair.gov.in/indias-forest-and-tree-cover-grows-by-1445-sq-km-india-state-of-forest-report-2023
2. Dynamic Ground Water Resource Assessment 2024, Central Ground Water Board, Ministry of Jal Shakti (reported by Mongabay India, January 2025): https://india.mongabay.com/2025/01/government-report-highlights-groundwater-contamination-across-india/
3. Summary of the Dynamic Ground Water Resource Assessment Report 2024, extraction stage and over exploited units: https://visionias.in/current-affairs/news-today/2025-01-06/economics-(indian-economy)/ministry-of-jal-shakti-releases-dynamic-groundwater-resource-assessment-report-2024

Key takeaways

• Natural resources are substances from nature that humans rely on for survival and wellbeing, including forests, water, air, and minerals.
• The Ganga river faces severe pollution due to untreated sewage and industrial waste from over a hundred cities, leading to initiatives like the Namami Gange Programme for conservation.
• The five R's—Refuse, Reduce, Reuse, Repurpose, and Recycle—provide a prioritized framework to minimize environmental harm before recycling.
• Sustainable development aims to meet present human needs while preserving resources for future generations, balancing economic growth with environmental conservation.
• Resource management must address long-term availability, fair distribution, and environmental impact, such as pollution from mining and waste disposal.

Test yourself

What is a natural resource?

A natural resource is a substance from nature that people use to sustain life and meet human needs, such as forests, water, air, and minerals.

Why was the Namami Gange Programme launched?

The Namami Gange Programme was launched to reduce pollution and conserve the Ganga river, addressing severe contamination from untreated sewage and industrial waste.

What is the first and most prioritized action among the five R's?

The first and most prioritized action is 'Refuse,' which means saying no to unnecessary or harmful products like single-use plastic bags.

What is sustainable development?

Sustainable development is growth that meets today's basic human needs while preserving resources for the needs of future generations.

Why is resource management necessary?

Resource management is necessary because resources are limited, demand is rising, and exploitation can harm the environment and future generations.

Frequently asked questions

What makes a natural resource a 'shared resource' and why does that matter?

A shared resource is one used by many people, like the Ganga river, where individual actions (e.g., dumping waste) harm the whole community. The note highlights that misuse of shared resources leads to pollution and loss of benefits for everyone, as seen in the Ganga’s contamination.

How do the five R's prioritize actions for environmental protection?

The five R's order actions from most to least impactful: Refuse unnecessary items, Reduce consumption, Reuse products, Repurpose old items, and Recycle materials. This hierarchy emphasizes avoiding waste before managing it, as recycling still requires energy.

Why is coliform presence in water a concern for human health?

Coliform bacteria indicate contamination from human waste, signaling the presence of disease-causing microorganisms. The note uses this as a practical test to assess water safety and pollution levels.

What does 'sustainable development' mean in the context of natural resources?

Sustainable development is growth that meets today’s basic needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet theirs. It links economic progress to environmental conservation, requiring mindful resource use today.