2010 has been declared as The International year of Biodiversity (IYB) by the UN to celebrate the life on planet Earth and its said that throughout the year there will be countless initiatives organized to disseminate information, promote the protection of biodiversity and encourage organizations, institutions, companies and individuals to take direct action to reduce the constant loss of biological diversity worldwide. The main motives will be to raise awareness about the importance of biodiversity and influence decision makers to raise the issue of biodiversity to top priority agenda. The events planned and initiatives taken can be followed closely on the UNEP webpage dedicated to IYB and the official video of the IYB can be viewed here.

As India has the 2.4 percent of the world's area but 5 - 7 % of its plant and animal species it is one of the 16 megadiverse countries and thus the environment minister Jairam ramesh announced 11 steps towards conservation of India's biodiversity in order to celebrate its status. From: http://blog.taragana.com/science/2010/01/04/11-goals-for-india-in-intern...

The good news in 2010 about India on the biodiversity front is that Environment minister Jairam Ramesh has banned the cultivation of Bt. Brinjal saving the country from another Biodiversity disaster. The other good news is that India has shown a considerable amount of reduction in poverty and we can expect 24% of poverty reduction by 2015. But a similar report on environmental sustainability by UN gives us the bad news on increasing water contamination and expansion of agriculture area leading to loss in forest area in past 5 years.

The India Biodiversity Portal hopes we meet the set targets in this year and post 2010 thus paving our way to a better and healthy future with fuller flourishing life on our Planet Earth.