- Medicinal plants were listed as a provisioning ecosystem service in the United Nations Millennium Ecosystem Assessment of 2005. India has had an ancient history of both codified and non-codified healing systems that use medicinal plants across the subcontinent.
- Medicinal plants play a crucial role in drug discovery, with at least 25 percent of modern medicine being derived either directly or indirectly from them.
- Challenges to conserving medicinal plants include overharvesting, biodiversity loss, eroding traditional knowledge and climate change.
- Under the principle of access-and-benefit sharing, as listed by the Convention of Biological Diversity and India’s Biological Diversity Act, local communities should benefit from sharing their plant resources and traditional knowledge with others.
That’s how much the overall international trade in medicinal plants and their products alone is expected to amount to by the year 2050. Estimates, as far as medicinal plants go, are many. According to one by the World Health Organisation (WHO), 70 to 95 per cent of people in many developing countries rely largely on traditional medicine – mostly herbal remedies – for primary healthcare. In 2006, researchers estimated that more than 70,000 plant species were being used in medicines worldwide.
However, despite their growing economic importance, medicinal plants – as an ecosystem service crucial to human health, livelihood and knowledge – are not popular in discourse. And with global biodiversity loss and erosion of traditional knowledge systems, threats to medicinal plants and their associated knowledge are many. Increased commercialisation of medicinal plant resources also brings in issues of access to this wealth and equitable sharing of benefits.
According to the Botanical Survey of India, India is home to more than 8,000 species of medicinal plants. The country has a rich history of traditional healing systems, many of which list the use of these plants. For instance, the oldest printed book on Indian medicinal plants, Hortus Malabaricus (a 12-volume treatise on the medicinal plants of the Malabar region along India’s west coast), dates back to 1678.
Forests that heal: Medicinal plants as an ecosystem service