Sacred Ecology: Institutionalising Ancient Indian Principles for Climate Centric Sustainable Development Goals

Humanity’s failure to grasp the implications of exponential growth has brought the natural world to a critical tipping point, endangering the very ecosystems upon which human survival depends. Modern society’s shift from sustainable living to excessive consumption has severely impacted the Earth’s biosphere, undermining its resilience and capacity to support life in all forms. This paper investigates the philosophical and ethical insights that encourage responsible stewardship of natural resources and promote systemic harmony. Specifically, it examines the connections between traditional Indian wisdom and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) outlined by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP 2015). Through a descriptive and exploratory approach, taking insights from literatures, the study argues that Indian philosophical thought offers valuable and expansive perspectives that can serve as a counternarrative to the ecological degradation driven by Western models of industrialisation, mass production, and consumerism. The uniqueness of the paper lies in its approach to look at literatures to support the argument that ethics and principles related to environment standards need to be institutionalised as social norms.