Nepal's geography, typified by vast differences in altitude and climate across a short north–south transect, has enabled tremendous biological diversity to flourish here, making it a hotspot for biodiversity.

The mountainous terrains that allow for such biodiversity to flourish here don't relent to rushed developmental interventions.

Mountain specificities – including inaccessibility, fragility, marginality, diversity or heterogeneity, and the human adaptations developed in response to these challenges – mean that development interventions in the mountains need to be specifically tailored to local realities and needs. In a sense the very geography that lends the country its biological richness is also one of the reasons why human development has lagged here.

Nepal's federal constitution of 2015 is oriented to leverage local governments towards eradicating poverty and improving people's well-being. Similarly, Nepal's15th five-year plan, currently guiding Nepal's development objectives, sets the course for Nepal's transition into a high-income country by 2043.This long-term plan can only be achieved if healthy ecosystems, stable ecosystem services and flourishing biodiversity are also prioritised and achieved. As the source of its resources, the country's biodiversity should lie at the very foundations of its development ambitions.

We know that biodiversity is not only vital to supplying the necessary resources to meet daily subsistence (extending to health, nutrition, education and income), but that it is also closely intertwined with cultural, religious, and emotional values.

For communities in remote mountainous areas, the collection and trade of medicinal plants and herbs– chiraito, jatamansi, and yarshagumba, to name a few – is the primary source of income and medicine.

Similarly, diversity of crops and agroforestry systems is vital for maintaining food security and access to energy.

Our team has collected and synthesised evidence from 140 research articles over almost two decades on the myriad ways in which biodiversity and its services contribute to people's well-being in Nepal.

Our study found substantial evidence that biodiversity is not only vital for people's daily lives but is also instrumental to meeting Nepal's near- and longterm developmental aspirations, such as achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and ensuring a smooth graduation from the UN list of Least Developed Countries.

Among the 17 SDGs, we found that biodiversity contributed directly to 12 SDGs and indirectly to the remaining five.

Importantly, Nepal simply cannot meet its future objectives of achieving food security, alleviating poverty, improving physical and mental health, accelerating economic growth, and increasing access to renewable energy without healthy ecosystems and biodiversity because they provide the very resources to meet these objectives.

For example, to alleviate poverty, reduce inequality and improve food security, Nepal has placed special emphasis on the sustainable management and commercialisation of non-timber forest products – a resource that is explicitly dependent on healthy ecosystems and rich biodiversity.

Encouragingly, Nepal's 15th five-year plan does envision nature-based interventions such as ecotourism, agroforestry, sustainable harvesting of medicinal herbs and bioengineering (all of which are also inherently provisioned by biodiversity) for the pursuit of rural development, climate change mitigation, equality, and disaster risk reduction.

Our study also synthesised evidence on trends in ecosystems and the services it provides to people across Nepal, and the results are bleak.

We found that in many parts of the country, healthy ecosystems, including forests, freshwater and grasslands, have been declining over the last two decades because of various direct drivers such as landuse change, overexploitation of natural resources, climate change and pollution, and indirect drivers such as ineffective governance, changes in sociocultural values and economic incentives.

Some of these drivers of change trace back to development interventions implemented without proper environmental appraisal and planning such as haphazard road construction, agricultural intensification, rapid expansion of urban areas, and the expansion of transmission lines.

This finding should bring home the point that if rushed, developmental interventions aimed to improve well-being can and do have negative consequences on natural and biological resources, and to the detriment of future sustainable development.

Many critical species habitats are shrinking because of fragmentation of forests, drinking water scarcity is being compounded by pollution, and medicinal herbs and non-timber forest products are declining.

Soil productivity is also declining, although food production is technically increasing in Nepal. There are, thus, some issues that need urgently looking into.

A reorienting of the tradeoffs that currently exist between development interventions and biodiversity is necessary.

For instance, the excessive use of chemical fertilisers and haphazard road construction (causing massive habitat fragmentation) could be addressed by prioritising proper training of farmers for the optimal use of fertilisers and efficiently engineered alignments with effective environmental management plans, respectively.

Balancing conservation and development is a complex task, especially for developing nations like Nepal, where it makes sense to urgently reduce poverty and improve human well-being.

But implementing development interventions without proper foresight can backfire in the long run by eroding the ability of nature to supply services necessary for long-term wellbeing.

All development goals are interconnected, and we must strive towards reconciling conservation goals with economic and social goals to truly achieve a sustainable future.

Implementing development interventions without foresight can erode the ability of nature to supply services necessary for long-term well-being.

(Both authors are affiliated to ICIMOD. Biraj Adhikari is a Research Fellow and Nakul Chettri is the Regional Programme Manager of Transboundary Landscapes.)

A version of this article appears in the print on November 25, 2022, of The Himalayan Times.