Kashmir likes to call its mountains a green capital, and the phrase fits. 

Forests regulate water, wetlands absorb it and store it, and alpine meadows feed the animals that pastoral families live on. Springs and streams then keep communities going far from the slopes where they begin. 

Climate change, land-use change, forest degradation, fires, unregulated extraction, grazing pressure and spreading human activity are wearing that capital down. 

Kashmir already has extensive environmental law and a network of departments responsible for its natural resources. The harder problem is that these landscapes are vast and often inaccessible, and their condition depends closely on what the people around them do from day to day. 

Institutions working mostly from outside may struggle to protect them alone, which raises a larger question: does conservation improve when the people who depend on natural resources hold a defined, lawful and accountable role in protecting and managing them?

An old tradition gives a place to start. 

Hima comes from an Arabic term linked to a protected or reserved area, and it meant setting aside a landscape or a resource and regulating its use for ecological and community purposes. 

Forms of it existed in the Arabian Peninsula before Islam, and Islamic traditions of stewardship developed it further. Its rules, boundaries and purposes changed with local ecology and society, so it never worked as one uniform system.

The tradition has outlived its history. 

Since 2004, the Society for the Protection of Nature in Lebanon has worked with communities to revive Hima as community-led conservation built around the health of whole natural systems. 

The Lebanese model has been used where biodiversity, local livelihoods and resource management meet. 

IUCN, UNDP and BirdLife International have supported its development, which links the approach to present-day goals for biodiversity and sustainable development. 

Lebanon shows that Hima does not have to be treated as an attempt to rebuild a medieval system. Its core idea, collective responsibility for natural resources and locally agreed limits on their use, can be fitted to modern law, science and institutions.

That is where Kashmir comes in. 

The aim would be to take the principle and leave the........

© Kashmir Observer