Neha Sinha: Nature in 2025 was a year of resilience amid global policy failures

January 2025. A Steppe eagle, a migratory bird of prey from Central Asia, soars high over the Aravalli hills. As we watch, it coasts in the air, and then locks its gaze on a garbage mountain that is taller than the surrounding hills. At Bandhwari landfill near prosperous Gurugram, the Steppe eagle dives to forage for pickings. If it sickens on refuse, we will never know, as it carries on its continental journey.

February 2025. Caught in a sudden storm, we hear a screech that cuts through the din of horns and the swish of the rain in Delhi. Above the conference area of the India Habitat Centre, a Barn owl hoots as dusk descends. In the daytime, Alexandrine parakeets haunt the same area, making as much noise as we do in the city.

March 2025. A team of us are at Rushikulya beach in Odisha. The beach has had an incredible event—the mass nesting of Olive Ridley turtles, something that doesn’t happen at scale every year. There are hundreds of thousands of eggs in the stripe of sand in front of us, lit by the moon. We wait for more turtles—all mothers—to arrive. In a fraught, warming world and beaches ringed with ships, it seems miraculous that turtles can swim long distances to lay eggs, not just alone, but together, supporting entire populations.

April 2025. The press is full of the news of young, gamboling “direwolf” pups—which are actually modified grey wolf pups—engineered to “bring back” extinct direwolves in the US. I’ve felt the pull of the idea that technology can solve all our problems, and then have remembered that wild wolves in the real world are persecuted on nearly every continent they are found in. Europe is nervous with wolves expanding their territories, in India wolves are seen as the thieves of livestock. I decide to visit a wolf site later in the year.

May 2025. A visit to the Himalayas reveals an abundance of thrushes, flycatchers and warblers. The hills are astoundingly alive, though people speak warily of cloudbursts, long and threatening, and changing rainfall which has scarred lives.

June and July 2025. Caught in the heat at various places, the shade and splendour of flowering trees—the Amaltas, and the last of the Palash—comes as a relief. India has begun finalising its positions for the climate talks in November, the 30th Conference of Parties (COP) under the United Nations Framework Convention of Climate Change. The global plastic treaty, working to create a legally binding instrument for plastic pollution, is coming up in August. Everyone is burdened with plastic and a heated planet, and there is hope for enforceable change from these important meetings.

August 2025. I am in southern West Bengal, which has an Indian grey wolf population. In World War II structures, wolves have denned and given birth to pups. Ranging over dry forest and agricultural areas, the wolves live on the margins of sight and imagination. We wait to see wolves, and instead spot another flagship of dry land—a striped hyena. The sun is just setting when the hyena emerges from a hillock in between coal mines. Also silhouetted against the fading light is a proud eagle-owl. The coal under the ground is on fire and the fumes rise in gentle curves. The air is noxious. The hyena moves slowly, ponderously, coming down the hill, merging into the vegetation, then hopping on to rock, like light and then shadow, pulsing in and out of our comprehension. In this most hostile of places, the clever wild animals endure, making the most of the scraps of land we have grudgingly left for them.

The owl flies off, and the hyena merges fully into the night.

September 2025. We are in the lateritic plateaus of Maharashtra, and the hills of Kaas, Panchgani and Mahabaleshwar have exploded into hundreds of thousands of native wild flowers. High up on the plateau, in between waving fields that could only have been planted by nature, a seasonal tide pool calmly mirrors the post-monsoon sky. It is hard to believe that such plateaus that look hot and bare in summer have often been wrongly, criminally, classified as wastelands.

October 2025. The Indian wolf has been classified as vulnerable, with a population of 3,000 individuals in the country. This is less than the tiger. Can we change this lupine story?

November 2025. Corbett Tiger Reserve hosts hornbill couples and squadrons of stern-looking owls. A tiger lopes across the road. In the Supreme Court, a case is being heard on a captive tiger safari in the reserve. The court rules that all illegal structures in Corbett should be razed, and throughout India, captive animal safaris should only be made on degraded land, without lessening the vitality of existing sanctuaries.

December 2025. Globally, the climate COP has had no meaningful outcome. The plastic treaty has failed. Here, authorities are now debating what constitutes the Aravalli hills. It is suggested that only hills above 100 metres from local terrain should be identified as Aravalli hills. Yet these mountains, greatly eroded over millennia—and thus no longer towering—are more than their size. They contain bio-crusts, root stock, fossil and ecological heritage that are simply irreplaceable. I briefly wonder if garbage mountains will qualify as hills, since height seems to be might.

Authentic might is the resilience of the wild. All through the year, animals have shown us how they hang on to the vestiges of habitat, scraping out life and the business of living.

In policy circles, and after a year of wars, people wonder if the age of multilateral agreements is over and if only bilateralism or strong regional policies are the way forward. For the animals, these ruminations mean next to nothing. Unless there is concrete action, in both policy and the ground—in letter and spirit—for saving natural habitats, their existence will continue on the margins of neglect.

As I write this, the air quality has dropped perilously in north India. The air seems burdened and heavy, like slate rather than gas. A bird is calling from a semal tree I can no longer see. Its song is sweet, complex, and always different from its last warble. I know it is an Oriental magpie-robin in forming its tunes, a little like the European robin that sings even with a thorn against its breast.

It is tempting to look at silver linings, and to conclude that wildlife and nature will always get by—sometimes assisted by whimsical genetic interventions, sometimes by random chance. But if there is one thing a year of failed negotiations has taught us, it is that nature is fighting to live, and that alone shows us what is worth fighting for.

Neha Sinha is a conservation biologist and author of the forthcoming book Wild Capital: Discovering Nature in Delhi (2026). Views expressed are personal.