Programmes
Work in the landscape
Dr. Sharma has initiated and led programmes addressing the interlinked problems of mountain ecosystems, water security, biodiversity and livelihoods across the Eastern Himalaya: revival and rejuvenation of drying springs, springshed and watershed management, biodiversity governance, ecosystem restoration and participatory natural resource management. Each places local institutions at the centre, linking scientific assessment to traditional practice and community stewardship of forests, water sources and farmland.
A second strand covers agroecology, agroforestry, pastoralism and sustainable mountain agriculture — organic farming, agrobiodiversity conservation, traditional crop and livestock systems, nomadic pastoralism, non-timber forest products and medicinal and aromatic plants. The emphasis falls on indigenous varieties and breeds, soil and ecosystem health, sustainable use of forest resources, and the resilience of farming and pastoral communities to environmental and economic change.
A third documents and applies indigenous and traditional knowledge — through participatory research, field-based learning, community documentation, capacity building and nature-based solutions — bridging scientific evidence and the knowledge held by farmers, pastoralists and local communities. Together they form one integrated approach to conservation, restoration, climate resilience and socio-ecological development. The publications behind them are listed under Research, and any of these programmes can be delivered as a lecture or seminar to your department.
Since 2008
Springshed revival: rejuvenating drying springs
NITI Aayog’s 2018 inventory of Himalayan springs reported that nearly half the perennial springs of the Indian Himalaya have dried up or turned seasonal. Dhara Vikas began in 2008, when Dr. Sharma — at The Mountain Institute – India, working with the Rural Development Department of the Government of Sikkim — took the initiative up in the Sumbuk area of South Sikkim. It was carried further with RDD and ICIMOD, with documented revival of springs across the region.
The method is aquifer-centric rather than spring-centric. Hydrogeological, geological and geomorphological survey delineates the recharge catchment of each spring; climate-adaptive revival measures are then sited within that catchment rather than at the spring mouth. Projects funded by Arghyam and NABARD have applied this across Sikkim and the Kalimpong hills.
- Around 150 springs, 35 rivulets and three lakes revived
- More than 20,000 households reached
- Bagey and Khani-Khola springshed watershed project, NABARD, 2021–2025
The springs and water record
Ten published outputs on springs, aquifers and water governance in the Eastern Himalaya, from 2012 to 2024.
Springs, lakes and aquifer-centric revival (7)
Water governance, towns and hydropower (4)
Since 2009
Biodiversity governance
Implementing the Convention on Biological Diversity and India’s Biological Diversity Act at village level — constituting community institutions, documenting genetic resources and the traditional knowledge attached to them, and building the legal record that protects both.
The instrument is the People’s Biodiversity Register, compiled by the village itself and held by a constituted Biodiversity Management Committee. Together they give a community standing under the Act: a documented claim to its own genetic resources, and a legal basis for access and benefit sharing when those resources are used by others. The same capacity building has been delivered across India, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Pakistan.
- 196 Biodiversity Management Committees facilitated
- 196 People’s Biodiversity Registers supported, 53 complete
- Training for committees, lawyers, journalists and officials on Access and Benefit Sharing
What this leaves standing in a village
Where the work is complete, a community is left holding four things it did not have before — and which very few villages anywhere possess.
- A completed People’s Biodiversity Register — a full inventory of genetic resources, traditional knowledge, crops, medicinal plants and wildlife.
- A constituted Biodiversity Management Committee — a legitimate community body that governs those resources and benefits from them.
- A documented biodiversity baseline — bird and butterfly surveys and years of photographic record.
- A local organisation able to deliver — at Bering, the Anant Bering Club, which co-delivers homestays, logistics and guiding, keeping the money in the village.
Publications on biodiversity governance (8)
Seed and sovereignty
Agrobiodiversity and seed banks
Conserving the crops mountain households actually depend on, and the knowledge that keeps them viable. Dr. Sharma provided the technical support for Biodiversity Management Committees to establish community seed banks at twenty locations, including Pendam and Lingee, under a Sikkim State Biodiversity Board programme; they hold traditional cereals, pulses and underutilised crops.
The base being conserved is large. More than 126 cereal landraces, 132 vegetable species, 64 fruit species and over 200 wild edibles are grown across 15–20 distinct field types, alongside some 21 indigenous livestock breeds. Millet has been guided back across some seventy Gram Panchayat Units since 2023, and in his own fields a Krishnabhog paddy line has been held for about 150 years. The full inventory and publication record →
- 20 community seed banks for traditional cereals, pulses and underutilised crops
- Millet cultivation guided across some 70 Gram Panchayat Units since 2023
Publications on agrobiodiversity and seed systems (6)
Policy into practice
Organic agriculture
Sikkim is the world’s first fully organic state. Dr. Sharma co-authored the technical volume behind its policy — Organic Farming in Sikkim as a Strategy for Sustaining Ecosystem Services and Livelihoods (2019) — which sets out the ecological case for the State Policy on Organic Farming and how it is to be implemented.
He also contributed to the FAO Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems initiative on Sikkim Himalayan agriculture and prepared the supporting technical report; the system is a candidate site for GIAHS. The argument he makes for it internationally is not that organic farming is virtuous but that, in these mountains, it is the system that already holds soil fertility, nutrient cycling, agrobiodiversity and household income together. More on the GIAHS candidature →
- Co-authored the technical volume behind Sikkim’s State Policy on Organic Farming
- Prepared the technical report behind Sikkim Himalayan agriculture’s FAO GIAHS candidature
Publications on organic agriculture (4)
Cardamom
Reviving large cardamom agroforestry
Large cardamom is worth roughly USD 45 million a year to Sikkim. From the mid-2000s more than 60% of its plantations became barely productive, and the cultivated area fell sharply — by 37% in a single year between 2006 and 2007. Doctoral biogeochemistry and farmers’ own revival practice together produced a phased replantation strategy over a fifteen-year cycle, with agriculture during fallow periods.
The revival programme itself was launched by Sikkim’s Department of Science and Technology in 2023, under the motto Mero Alainchi, Mero Dhan — My Cardamom, My Wealth — engaging around 2,000 farmers directly. Dr. Sharma’s research findings and publications on large cardamom provide its technical support.
The work on these systems goes back to 1997, when Dr. Sharma began research on traditional agroforestry at the G.B. Pant National Institute of Himalayan Environment and Development, and it has run through the doctorate and the revival strategy since. In 2015 he was appointed international consultant to the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), Kathmandu, as cardamom expert under its HIMALICA programme, working on the revival of large cardamom and the introduction of cardamom-based agroforestry across districts of eastern Nepal. That work produced a farmers’ manual on climate-smart practices (2016) and a package of practices for a climate-resilient cardamom value chain (2017), both published with ICIMOD, and was carried back into the Kangchenjunga landscape through regional cross-learning at Taplejung in 2017. The strategy now runs on both sides of the border.
Publications on large cardamom (12)
Basin to farm
Climate change adaptation
Under HI-AWARE — Himalayan Adaptation, Water and Resilience — the Teesta basin was assessed as a single system, from 30 m at Rangpur in Bangladesh to 4,500 m at Muguthang in North Sikkim. The Mountain Institute – India, which Dr. Sharma heads, worked as operational partner to CEDAR, Dehradun and TERI, New Delhi, and as strategic partner to ICIMOD.
The work centred on critical climate-stress moments — the points at which households, livelihoods and ecosystems are pushed past coping. It combined 490 household surveys with focus-group discussions, case studies and key-informant interviews across high-altitude, mid-hill and floodplain environments, documenting glacial lake outburst floods, cloudbursts, floods, landslides, riverbank erosion, erratic rainfall, water scarcity, crop loss, emerging pests and diseases, and extreme cold and snowfall.
The principal finding was hydrological: the drying of springs, streams and rivulets is the recurrent stressor across these communities. The adaptation pathways documented are correspondingly local — hydrogeology-based springshed and catchment restoration, ecosystem rehabilitation, traditional agroforestry, land-use diversification, the return of indigenous landraces, highland–lowland seed exchange, collective labour sharing and rotational pastoralism, alongside disaster response and safer resettlement. Community-based adaptation and nature-based solutions, validated scientifically and backed by hydrogeological assessment and enabling policy, strengthen water security and livelihoods measurably.
Beyond HI-AWARE the enquiry runs into the farming systems themselves: how climatic variability is changing cereals, vegetables, spices, tuber crops and fruit species and the agrobiodiversity they belong to, and how it is changing vegetation dynamics, species composition, productivity and ecosystem functioning across the Eastern Himalaya. A parallel strand follows biodiversity in human-dominated landscapes — forests, agroecosystems and managed habitats — tracking species distribution, abundance, phenology, habitat suitability, ecological interactions and ecosystem services. Agroforestry is treated as an adaptation measure in its own right, climate-smart practice manuals were written for cardamom growers in Sikkim and eastern Nepal, and spring conservation is documented as adaptation action. Dr. Sharma serves on the State Action Plan on Climate Change Committee.
For development agencies working on adaptation and mitigation, what this record offers is a basin-scale assessment that is ground-truthed household by household: a method for identifying climate-stress moments, a tested set of nature-based measures, and a long field baseline against which change can be measured. For universities and research scholars it offers established field sites, documented communities and an interdisciplinary frame spanning hydrogeology, agroecology, biodiversity and governance. Collaboration, supervision and joint proposals are all open. Get in touch →
Publications on climate adaptation (9)
Knowledge held by communities
Indigenous and traditional knowledge
Traditional knowledge is documented, protected and applied here rather than merely recorded. The People’s Biodiversity Registers capture the knowledge attached to genetic resources; the access and benefit sharing provisions of the Biological Diversity Act give communities a claim on it; and training for committees, lawyers, journalists and officials is what makes that claim usable.
The published work covers the ethnomedicine and traditional knowledge of Sikkim’s major tribes, bioprospecting and biopiracy across the mega-diversity nations of India and Southeast Asia, sacred landscapes and the indigenous systems that manage them, and soil fertility maintained by traditional agroforestry. Dr. Sharma serves on the State Traditional Knowledge Committee.
Publications on indigenous and traditional knowledge (8)
Systems that already work
Safeguarding regenerative traditional agriculture
Dr. Sharma has worked on traditional, organically managed farming systems in the Sikkim Himalaya for more than three decades — and learned the practice itself from his parents and grandparents in the village of Bering.
Traditional Himalayan farming systems are already regenerative: perennial tree cover, organic inputs, closed nutrient cycling and high crop diversity held on the same ground. Dr. Sharma’s work measures that rather than asserting it — soil fertility maintained by indigenous knowledge in agroforestry-based farming, the socio-ecological and economic potential of traditional agroforestry systems, and those systems as land management that supports ecosystem services. Current work extends the assessment to multitrophic conservation value: crop diversity, woody and understorey species, and avifaunal and lepidopteran communities measured together.
Safeguarding them is the applied half. These systems are under pressure from climate change and socio-economic change, which his work on the sustainability of dynamic traditional farming has tracked since 2009, and the protective instruments are the ones already built here — People’s Biodiversity Registers, community seed banks and the GIAHS candidature. The comparative base is wide: traditional farming systems studied across Northern Thailand, Lao PDR, Myanmar, Malaysia, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, Yunnan, and the tanada and satoyama of northern Japan.
Judging what sustains such a system needs both kinds of knowledge at once. Across eight farming systems of the Far-Eastern Himalaya, a transdisciplinary study published in Sustainability defined a composite sustainability space: positive and negative factors set by communities and by disciplinary experts together, the relationships between them resolved by principal component analysis, and the result drawn as a radar diagram. Sustainability turned on seven components being strengthened together — geophysical prerequisites, ecological foundations, integrated processes and practices, resources and knowledge and value systems, stakeholders’ development and economic aspirations, the well-being of farming communities, and government support. The more evenly attention is spread across the seven, the more sustainable the system.
Publications on traditional farming systems (6)
Towards global recognition
Sikkim Himalayan agriculture and the FAO GIAHS programme
The FAO’s Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems programme designates farming landscapes of global significance — systems that hold agrobiodiversity, traditional knowledge, landscape and livelihoods together, and that are kept living rather than preserved. Dr. Sharma carried out the research and prepared the proposal for the global recognition of Sikkim Himalayan agriculture, and wrote the supporting technical report. The system is a candidate GIAHS site.
The case was first made in 2007, at the International Expert Meeting on Conserving Agricultural Heritage Systems in Mountainous Landscapes — convened in Gangtok by Sikkim University, United Nations University, Kyoto University and ICIMOD, and coordinated by Dr. Sharma from UNU during his postdoctoral fellowship there.
The case rests on evidence already assembled in these mountains: the documented agrobiodiversity inventory, traditional agroforestry measured across three decades, the policy base of the world’s first fully organic state, and the indigenous knowledge recorded in People’s Biodiversity Registers. GIAHS is dynamic conservation, not preservation — it recognises a system that has to keep working to survive. The work is ongoing: candidate status is a step towards full designation, not the end of it.
Publications on agricultural heritage systems (2)
High pastures
Impact of grazing in forest ecosystems
Dr. Sharma has worked on both the impact and the benefits of grazing — in forest areas and in human-dominated landscapes — across the full elevational range of Sikkim: subtropical, temperate, subalpine, alpine and the transhumance zones above them.
Sikkim closed its forests to grazing in 1998. The Government of Sikkim then commissioned Dr. Sharma to establish what the ban had actually done, across phytosociological change, soil nutrient dynamics, forest regeneration and the socio-economy of the pastoral communities excluded by it.
The finding ran against the policy. Regulated, rotational grazing improves forest ecosystem health while sustaining pastoral livelihoods and the cultural systems bound to them; the soil evidence was published in 2024, and the full assessment went to the JICA-funded Sikkim Biodiversity Conservation and Forest Management Project in 2020.
The work extends into the high pastures themselves — yak herding in the Sikkim Himalaya, its status and prospects, and the transboundary questions it raises along a frontier that herds have always crossed and policy increasingly does not.
The Sikkim Himalaya lies within one of 34 globally significant biodiversity hotspots and forms a transboundary landscape. About 59% of the state — 4,187 km² — lies above 3,000 m, across the Greater and Trans-Himalaya, inhabited by livestock-dependent ethnic groups each with its own rangeland management system. Two multidisciplinary studies between 2006 and 2012 examined pastoral practice there, focused on yak herding, using geospatial and field survey methods to establish the spatial extent of herding, movement patterns and the pressures on the communities practising it.
In the Greater Himalaya of western Sikkim (3,000–4,300 m) the traditional banpala sheep breed has been progressively replaced by yaks and their crossbreeds, which graze alpine meadow in summer and descend into multilayered temperate and subalpine forest in winter, degrading habitat as they go. Forest degradation from human pressure and grazing, human–wildlife conflict, and the illegal collection and trade of species along the Indo-Nepal border are the principal transboundary issues.
In the Trans-Himalaya (4,300–6,000 m) both grazing area and animal populations — sheep and Tibetan yak breeds — have declined over twenty years. Here the nomadic Dokpas, Lachungpas and Lachenpas practise a distinct pastoralism, moving to high cold-desert ranges in winter and returning to moist alpine pasture in spring, with rotational grazing governed by Dumsa, an indigenous institution. Where stocking density is high, habitat degrades and herds compete with wild ungulates for forage and space. Managing these rangelands calls for an integrated conservation and development policy built on equitable sharing of ecosystem goods and services, and on transboundary cooperation.
Lanzhou and Qinghai, August 2014
The 5th International Conference on Yak
In April 2014 the Lanzhou Institute of Husbandry and Pharmaceutical Sciences of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences invited Dr. Sharma, then at The Mountain Institute India in Gangtok, to the 5th International Conference on Yak, held at the Gansu Conference and Exhibition Center in Lanzhou from 27 to 30 August 2014. Its themes were the sustainable development of yak husbandry, climate change and the environment, grazing systems, genetic resources and breeding, nutrition and feeds, reproduction and physiology, and disease and health services. On 29 August, in the session organised by ICIMOD, he presented Status, Challenges and Prospects of Yak Herding in the Sikkim Himalaya, India (photographs on the Lectures page).
On 30 August the conference’s field visit took the delegates to the yak pastures of Datong County in Qinghai, at nearly 3,000 m, where riders drove a herd of hundreds of yaks across the valley floor in front of them, and to the Datong Yak Breeding Center beside the pasture.
Publications on grazing and pastoralism (4)
Since 2009
Zero Waste Initiative in Sikkim
The Yuksam–Dzongri–Goecha La corridor carries trekkers from 1,500 to 4,300 m through the Khangchendzonga landscape, and for years it carried their rubbish with them. Shri Pema Gyalshan Bhutia and his highly proactive team from the Khangchendzonga Conservation Committee, and Dr. Sharma and his team including Shri Nima Tashi Bhutia from The Mountain Institute – India, initiated and institutionalised a community zero-waste model there in 2009. Between six and ten thousand tonnes of waste have been removed voluntarily, and the litter in, litter out monitoring the committee developed was later adopted by the Government of Sikkim.
The model was then replicated at Lachen in North Sikkim through the Dzumsa, the traditional institution that governs the valley, under a Government of India Incredible India initiative with the district administration — work that contributed to Lachen’s plastic-free status and to the state’s wider plastic ban. It is still running, sixteen years on, which is the harder test.
Similarly, this initiative was replicated at the Tsogmo high-altitude lake area in 2010, with the active leadership of the Pokhari Sanrakshan Samiti (Lake Conservation Committee), the WWF India team and the TMI India team consisting of Dr. Sharma and Shri Nima Tashi Bhutia, in collaboration with the Forest and Environment Department of the Government of Sikkim. Litter, trash, tetrapacks, plastics and bottles were collected, and litter bins were installed for different categories of litter. This initiative has been a successful model and is still functioning. It consequently resulted in a government notification for the collection of an environmental cess of ₹10 per tourist visiting the lake, and the revenue generated is being utilised for conservation activities.
Since 2006
Himal Rakshaks: herders as guardians
The people who know where biodiversity is being taken are usually the people who used to graze there. When Sikkim closed its forests to grazing in 1998, the graziers lost their living; in 2006 The Mountain Institute formed Himal Rakshaks — guardians of the Himalaya — out of those same men, and set them to work on wildlife and biodiversity monitoring. Dr. Sharma led the conversion of graziers into conservationists, and heads the programme today.
The Forest and Environment Department of the Government of Sikkim issued a regulation that same year, recognising the Rakshaks and setting out their objectives. They hold honorary stewardship of the alpine areas of the Khangchendzonga landscape, the national park included, with limited rights to forest produce in return for conservation work — a bargain rather than a gesture. It converts a problem into a capability: men who lost access to the forest gain a recognised role, and the state gains monitoring in terrain no patrol reaches regularly.
They work with the Pokhari Sanrakshan Samitis, the committees that watch the high lakes at Tsogmo and Khecheopalri; between them they monitor graziers, medicinal plant collectors and poachers. How local institutions of this kind can control illegal trade along the Singalila range and the Indo-Nepal border was examined in a separate ICIMOD-funded study of governance in the Hindu Kush Himalaya.
The work is expeditionary, and the state now depends on it. The Forest and Environment Department runs high-altitude expeditions with the Rakshaks to monitor biodiversity and wildlife around Dzongri and Goecha La in West Sikkim and along the Singalila range on the Indo-Nepal border — patrols that camp on snow and move supplies by pack horse where no road goes. In June 2014 they carried out joint monitoring with counterparts across the frontier: the transboundary cooperation the rangeland research argues for, in practice rather than in principle.
Related publication (1)
Since 2008
Economically and ecologically viable cultivation of medicinal and aromatic plants
Since 2008 Dr. Sharma has worked on the conservation of medicinal and aromatic plants: restoring their habitats, bringing them into community-based cultivation and developing value-added products from them.
The work began with support from the MacArthur Foundation and was strengthened by projects funded by national and international agencies — ICIMOD, IDRC, the Government of Sikkim’s Forest and Environment Department and Department of Science and Technology, and the G.B. Pant National Institute of Himalayan Environment.
Under the National Mission on Himalayan Studies (NMHS), Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, Government of India, his project Sustainable Use of Sikkim Himalayan Biodiversity for Socio-economic Development (2016–2018) promoted the sustainable use of four high-value species: the Chinese caterpillar fungus Ophiocordyceps sinensis, seabuckthorn Hippophae salicifolia, Docynia indica and Rhus chinensis. It set out to strengthen rural livelihoods, promote ecological conservation and develop community-based enterprises that add value to these resources.
Through The Mountain Institute India he has built collaborations with the Sikkim Biodiversity Board, under the Forest and Environment Department, Government of Sikkim, and with the Department of Botany, Sikkim University. The work has developed agro-techniques for individual species, established nurseries, promoted cultivation by communities and distributed economically and ecologically suitable species free of charge to farmers across the Eastern Himalaya.
The initiative has engaged some 1,500 farmers. It has helped spread sustainable cultivation practices, diversify rural livelihoods, conserve valuable indigenous plants and open livelihood opportunities built on the sustainable use of the region’s biodiversity.
Publications on medicinal and high-value species (4)
From the knowledge holders
Documentation of traditional and associated knowledge for People’s Biodiversity Registers
A People’s Biodiversity Register records more than species. It holds the knowledge attached to them — the crop landraces a village keeps, the medicinal plants it uses and how it uses them — and that knowledge has to be gathered from the people who hold it.
Dr. Sharma gathers it in interviews with the knowledge holders themselves, and it is entered in the village’s own register, held by its Biodiversity Management Committee under the Biological Diversity Act.
The work continues for the Sikkim Biodiversity Board, preparing People’s Biodiversity Registers across 20 Gram Panchayat Units, and district registers, from 2023 to 2026. The approach is described in his 2024 chapter with B.K. Pradhan, People’s Biodiversity Register: documentation, protection and conservation of genetic resources and associated traditional knowledge in Sikkim Himalaya (Springer).
Since 1997
Working with traditional shamanic healers and herbal practitioners
Since 1997 Dr. Sharma has worked with the people who keep Sikkim’s indigenous systems of medicine alive: traditional shamanic healers, herbal practitioners and users of medicinal plants — women and men, most of them elderly, some of them young.
The work began at the G.B. Pant National Institute of Himalayan Environment and continued at the WWF-India Sikkim Regional Office from 2001. As a JSPS–UNU Postdoctoral Fellow at the United Nations University he worked with healers in Thailand, Myanmar, Yunnan Province of China and parts of Japan.
At The Mountain Institute India the work has been extensive. Under a project funded by ICIMOD in 2009–2010 he documented more than 500 traditional healers of Sikkim by name, and he has gone on recording their knowledge, which treats a wide range of ailments in people and in domestic animals. Part of it is published in Ethnomedicine and traditional knowledge of the major tribes of Sikkim (2026, with B.K. Pradhan).
Since 2000
Non-timber forest products and wild edible plants
Since 2000 Dr. Sharma has worked on the non-timber forest products (NTFPs) of Sikkim, wild edible plants above all: identifying and documenting them, and working on their conservation, value addition and marketing.
Sikkim’s range of climates, forests and indigenous knowledge supports a remarkable diversity of useful plants. Wild fruits and berries, leafy greens, shoots, roots and tubers, flowers and mushrooms are part of everyday diets, and for forest-fringe and rural households they add nutrition and seasonal income. Working in the field with indigenous and local communities, he records the wild edible, medicinal and aromatic plants they use: what they are used for, how and when they are harvested, and what they could earn in local markets.
For the State Forest Department he assessed the tradable bioresources of Sikkim in 2015–2016 (Tradable Bio-resources of Sikkim, Sikkim Biodiversity Board, 2016). A National Mission on Himalayan Studies project on the sustainable use of Sikkim’s biodiversity for socio-economic development (2016–2018) centred on caterpillar fungus (Ophiocordyceps sinensis), seabuckthorn (Hippophae salicifolia), Mel (Docynia indica) and Bhakimilo (Rhus chinensis). He has published on the traditional extraction of medicinal chuk from the last three (2018, 2019) and on the commercial prospects and sustainability of caterpillar fungus (2020). Two ICIMOD-funded assessments, in 2009–2010 and 2011–2012, examined the illegal trade in wildlife and NTFPs in the Khangchendzonga–Singalila landscape.
The approach is community-based: sustainable harvesting, processing, value addition and links to markets, so that local products earn more for the people who gather them without compromising the natural regeneration of wild resources. The aim is to give NTFPs and wild edibles their place in Sikkim’s bioeconomy, linking traditional knowledge, biodiversity conservation, food and nutritional security and community livelihoods — the theme of his chapter Biodiversity to bioeconomy: Harnessing the green wealth of the Eastern Himalaya (2026, with Bharat P.).
