“When I returned to my village, everything was gone. There were no birds. No fish in the river. And the forest was empty. There was silence,” Ivan Zhimomi says.

It’s a clear, sun-soaked late October morning, and I am in Sukhai — a remote village in Nagaland’s cloud-capped Zunheboto district. Ivan, the chieftain-in-waiting, is telling me about the experience that changed his life and the way of life in this parental village of the Sümi, one of the 17 major indigenous ethnic groups of Nagaland. 

“When I was young, I used to hunt more than twenty birds a day with my slingshot,” Ivan remembers. “But then everything changed. It was like a desert. Only stones remained in the river. And I thought something had gone terribly wrong.”

In 2014, Ivan returned to Sukhai after three decades of living and working elsewhere and realised that the delicate ecological balance of his mountainous homeland had changed. Decades of unregulated hunting, fishing, and slash-and-burn ‘jhoom’ cultivation had wreaked havoc on the landscape. Something needed to be done before the birds, fish, animals, insects, and the forest that he grew up with were gone forever. Ivan got to work. He transformed his own lands into a sustainable agro-forest and encouraged other villagers to do the same. Today, Sukhai and its neighbouring villages of Gukhuyi and Kivikhu are the epicentre of a community-led conservation effort to restore the eastern Himalayan biosphere in Nagaland.

Under the leadership of Ivan, the inhabitants of the Sukhai, Gukhuyi, and Kivikhu villages have come together and created a model of community-led conservation that is slowly changing their traditional way of life for a more sustainable lifestyle that's guided by sustainable development practices but rooted in the ancient, indigenous cultural heritage of the Sümi tribe. 

This conservation effort is part of ‘Mountains to Mangroves’, a major, community-led environmental initiative working across the Eastern Himalayas — in India, Nepal, Bhutan, and Bangladesh — to restore forests and farmlands, protect biodiversity, secure water resources, and strengthen climate resilience, from the high Himalayan ecosystems to the coastal mangrove forests of the Sundarbans.

Founded by Conservation International, with key partners including The Energy and Resources Institute and People Like Us Create, as well as government bodies across local, regional, state, and national levels, Mountains to Mangroves is supporting the community to reforest jhoom fallows, establish sustainable agro-forests, enforce restrictions on fishing and hunting, and revive indigenous art and craft traditions as alternative livelihoods.

“We are following a three-way approach,” Ivan explains. “On the agricultural side, we have introduced an agro-forestry model where each acre of land has several species of horticultural plants like papaya, pomegranate, and lemon trees alongside vegetable crops like ginger, garlic, turmeric, and grain crops like maize, millet, and rice.”

“We have also revived traditional conservation practices like a ban on hunting animals,” Ivan says. “Fishing and hunting are completely prohibited.”

“We have categorised community lands into three zones,” Ivan explains. “In the core zone, which consists of the forests inhabited by wild animals and their breeding grounds, human activities are completely restricted. In the buffer zone, villagers can collect non-timber forest products, firewood, and timber for housing construction and other utilities. And in the economic zone, which is the land closest to the villages with common fencing, common irrigation channels, and common planting materials, they can do plantations or agro-forestry.”

The preservation and revival of folk art forms, mythologies, music traditions, and craft heritage is the third front of this initiative. While Conservation International and The Energy and Resources Institute are providing the community with support and resources for ecosystem restoration and biodiversity conservation, People Like Us Create is upskilling local youths to become digital-first storytellers and content creators, documenting and sharing restoration efforts, plantation drives, and the community’s cultural life and heritage. This year alone, the community has planted over 120,000 plants and trees in degraded jhoom fallows in the region.

In late October, I accompanied the People Like Us Create team — founder Tamseel Hussain, video producer Charu Gupta, and communications specialist Shambhavi Kanodia — on a field trip to experience the real-time and real-world impact of the Mountains to Mangroves initiative. My journey involved an hour-long flight from Kolkata to Dimapur, a six-hour road trip to Zunheboto, the district headquarters where we spent the night, and another hour-long drive through winding dirt tracks to reach Sukhai the next morning. Here, Ivan walked me through the various ways the community is working to protect and restore the region’s biodiversity while also creating economic opportunities for community members through community-focused interventions. We also discussed land rights and use, the disappearing folk traditions, oral histories, and music of the Sümi tribe, as well as the future Ivan envisions for Sümi youth.

“The individual owns land in Nagaland,” Ivan explained to me. “That was one of the challenges. Earlier, people were hunters, fishers, and farmers of monoculture crops. We had to convince them to donate their land to the community voluntarily. It was a herculean task.”

In the end, however, Ivan succeeded. The land in Sukhai is now collectively owned and managed by the community, with members receiving compensation through alternative livelihoods.

“We started with capacity building for the first three years,” Ivan explained. “We began with community participation in preparing the ‘People’s Biodiversity Register’ (PBR), where we recorded our history, cultural and agricultural practices, traditional conservation techniques, biodiversity, flora and fauna, and worked closely with the State Biodiversity Board to update the PBR. We mapped almost 200 species of insects and over 200 species of birds in the community-conserved areas (CCAs) surrounding Sukhai. We rediscovered the Mandarin Trinket Snake (Euprepiophis mandarinus), which was last recorded in the region during the British colonial period. We have also recorded the presence of the Krananda Moth (Krananda lucidaria) here, which has been authenticated by the Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS).”

Ecological conservation is only one aspect of this story. These interventions would not be sustainable without providing viable alternative livelihoods for the community, and this is where Sukhai stands out. As part of the Mountains to Mangrove initiative, community members who were previously engaged in fishing and hunting are now being trained as tourist guides, woodworkers, bamboo weavers, and homestay hosts. Market links are also being established with the district headquarters at Zunheboto, where villagers can sell their agricultural produce and handicrafts to earn a living. For the Sümi, a historically warrior tribe reliant on slash-and-burn jhoom and terrace cultivation, this is a fundamental shift in their identity and way of life.

Ivan is keenly aware of this. “The land, the forest, and the river are the pride of every Naga,” he says. “Most Nagas are forest-dwellers. Forest resources are central to our economy.”

While Ivan understands the necessity for forest and biodiversity conservation, he also emphasises the importance of preserving the cultural heritage and identity of the Sümis. For Ivan, the solution to this is the resurrection of the Morung — a fading Naga institution where elders trained young unmarried men in their tribe’s history and social systems. Ivan intends to revive this ages-old institution, where the younger generations — both boys and girls — can learn from community elders and preserve the disappearing folk traditions of the tribe.

“Unless and until the youth are involved, any project, any initiative cannot be successful,” Ivan says. “Today, only a few of the village’s three to four hundred youths are involved with the conservation and cultural heritage preservation initiatives. I foresee a future when all of them will come forward and participate in these efforts and lead the community.”

Community-led efforts, such as Mountains to Mangroves, demonstrate that climate action in the Eastern Himalayas cannot succeed without the participation of the people who have shaped these landscapes for generations. In Sukhai and its neighbouring villages, the Sümi community does not think of conservation as a departure from tradition, but as an evolution of it — a way to protect their identity while adapting to new environmental realities. By strengthening ecological knowledge, securing alternative livelihoods, and rebuilding collective stewardship of farmlands, forests, and rivers, these initiatives demonstrate that climate resilience is also ultimately a form of cultural resilience. Sukhai is only a glimpse of what this looks like in practice.

Learn more about the 'Mountains to Mangroves' initiative here.

Follow Conservation International here.

Follow People Like Us Create here.

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