One of the world's eight richest biodiversity hotspots is also the site of a 14-year regulatory stalemate — and in July 2024, the cost of that delay became impossible to ignore.
The Western Ghats run roughly 1,600 km along India's western coast, through the states of Gujarat, Maharashtra, Goa, Karnataka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu. UNESCO recognized the range as a World Heritage Site in 2012, citing it as one of the world's eight richest biodiversity hotspots and older than the Himalayas. The range is also the source of the Godavari, Krishna and Kaveri river systems, which sustain agriculture and drinking water for a large share of peninsular India — making the Ghats' condition a matter that reaches far beyond the forest boundary itself.
More than 7,000 species have been recorded in the Western Ghats, with exceptionally high rates of endemism — species found nowhere else on Earth. The amphibian record alone stands at 253 known species, roughly 94% of them endemic, and new species are still being formally described: in 2026 researchers described the Kali night frog (Nyctibatrachus kali) from Karnataka's Castlerock region, a cryptic species so similar to a previously known relative that it could only be confirmed using genetic analysis.
Source: Mongabay India, 2026; species records compiled from published taxonomic surveysThe range is a mosaic rather than a single habitat type: tropical evergreen and semi-evergreen rainforest at lower and mid elevations, giving way to high-altitude shola forest patches interspersed with rolling montane grassland further up. That shola-grassland mosaic is itself a distinct, threatened ecosystem — it hosts species, including the Nilgiri tahr below, that depend on the grassland component specifically and decline when it's lost to plantation conversion or unmanaged afforestation, even where overall tree cover appears to increase.
The Nilgiri Tahr Project (2022–2027), run jointly by the Tamil Nadu and Kerala forest departments, combines shola-grassland restoration, radio-collaring, drone surveillance, captive breeding and reintroduction into former range — and the 2025 census results are the clearest evidence yet that the approach is working for at least this one species. The broader Ecologically Sensitive Area effort has been far less successful: despite the Kasturirangan panel's recommendation dating to 2012, the notification remains stuck in 2026 over disagreements between the central government and individual states, with Karnataka opposing the current proposal outright and Goa seeking exclusions for specific villages. The Ministry of Environment has extended its expert committee's mandate to review the issue through July 2027.
This report carries a "Strong" Evidence Level rating: species-level monitoring in the Western Ghats is unusually good by global standards, anchored by a genuinely rigorous 2025 cross-state Nilgiri tahr census and a long, active record of taxonomic description for amphibians and other endemic groups. The weaker link is policy and land-use data rather than ecological data — the Ecologically Sensitive Area boundary has been redrawn and contested seven times since 2014, meaning there is no single agreed map of which areas are actually protected on paper, let alone in practice, and forest-cover statistics that count monoculture plantations as "forest" can overstate how much natural habitat truly remains.