The survey aims to formulate a long-term strategy to protect the popular hill towns in the district from increasing pressure due to unregulated tourism, mounting vehicular traffic, population pressure, among others.
- Previously, in September 2024, National Green Tribunal directed the state government to classify the Nainital district based on carrying capacity and environmental sensitivity.
What is Carrying Capacity?
- It refers to the maximum threshold of population an area can bear in relation to the available resources.
- It depends on both biotic (e.g. vegetation, hydrology) and abiotic (e.g. terrain, climate) factors.
- Two major approaches for assessing Carrying Capacity:
- Planetary boundaries approach: Applied in the context of environmental crises such as global warming, land degradation, pollution, water stress.
- Biocapacity Overshoot approach: It is sustainability metric about the demand humans put on the earth systems by consuming total annual productivity of natural systems within a few months every year. e.g., Earth Overshoot Day.
- Significance of carrying capacity in planning for sustainable development: Carrying capacity assessment based on precautionary principles (refer infographic) provides the option to practically deal with the tussle between ‘developmental governance’ and ‘sustainability of development’.
