Evaluation of concordance between environment and Economy: A resource inventory of Dal Lake

Dal Lake is a hot place of a series of ecological restoration and environmental remediation programs nowadays. As ecosystem service and natural resources are closely related with social and economic development. Economic development, the ultimate goal of which is to improve human welfare, is crucially dependent on the environment and natural resources to provide goods and services which directly and indirectly generate socio-economic benefits. Governments in developing countries are becoming increasingly aware that environmental and natural resource degradation endangers the potential for long term development. The natural resources that are known for certain today are only a part that is actually available. Those which are available are those which can be extracted from nature under the prevailing technological, economic and social conditions. There are different viewpoints as to the optimum human population this planet can support - ranging from 15 billion to 100 billion. However crude the estimates may be, one casualty of these estimates has been that the quality of environment in which population would be surviving has not been taken into consideration. One thing is certain that as things stand, there are no infinite reserves of resources that can sustain ever increasing human population. The message is simple - conserve the renewable resources: recycle, improve the technology and process of non-renewable resources extraction and utilization; reduce the per capita consumption, etc.

A natural resource ecosystem is an integrated ecological system, one element of which is a product of direct or indirect use to man. The product may be biological as in the case of forests, agricultural products, fish and wildlife; physical in the case of water, air and soil or both. In all the cases, the distinguishing facet of a natural resource ecosystem is that man has direct involvement in the complex set of ecological interactions. Water resource which is one of the basic needs of man is misused by different ways as man progressed towards new technological developments from last few decades. The objective of the present research paper is to analyse the various changes in and around Dal Lake, which have occurred due to different natural and human induced causes from the last few decades.