India's Forest Cover : Up, Down Or Cover- Up

The feel good India State of Forest Report (ISFR) has come under sharp criticism. Though the government hasdefended it, such reports have been“nonstop good news” since 1999. Till 1997,the forest cover declined in India after which it went up by a whopping 45,000sq km over the next three reports. Experts attribute two key changes in 2001which contributed to this: FSI adopted a fully digital analysis workflow, andit dramatically changed its definition of a forest, leading to scathing attacks.   

Report To Meet Climate  Targets On Paper ?

Overall, the 2021 report said, India has recorded an increase of 1,540 sq kms in its forest cover. India’s total forestcover is 713,789 sq km or 21.71 % of the total geographical area of thecountry. India has set a target of bringing 33 % of its geographical area underforest cover. By showing an increase in forest cover, India wants to achievethe target on paper, it is alleged. The 33% is a reference to the National Green India Mission, one of eight missions under India’s National Action Planon Climate Change. Under the mission, the national government hopes to bring athird of its land area under forest cover in a decade or so. The governmentwants to justify its policy of diversion of forests for energy, infrastructure and other industrial projects. If the forest cover is shown on the rise, no onewould criticize the diversion, it is believed. Rising forest cover also offersbright prospects in global carbon trade, where countries adding forest covercould trade their carbon gains to offset emissions of other countries for money.

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India, understandably, is trying tocash in by claiming vast forest expanse and huge year-on-year growth. But, theworld is not ready to buy our claims without scrutiny, said MD Madhusudan https://t.co/E8RvSUc2Ts whose tweetsdenouncing the report set twitter on fire. An eminent wildlife biologistand ecologist, Madhusudan is the co-founder and director of Nature Conservation Foundation. If India continues to trot out dubious figures on forest cover, it risks a serious loss of credibility in its leadership in the global debate onequity in lowering the carbon intensity of the global economy, he said.  According to the government’s nationally determined contributions under the Paris Agreement, India has pledged to createcarbon sinks equivalent to 2.5 billion tons to 3 billion tons of carbon dioxideby increasing its forest and tree cover by 2030. In fact, the ‘State of Forest’report is designed to calculate the forest cover to indicate efforts and extentof compliance with domestic forest policy and international climate targets,The Wire Science writes quoting Kanchi Kohli, an environmental policy expertand senior researcher at the Center for Policy Research, New Delhi. 

Govt’s Defence 

Union environment minister BhupenderYadav has defended the report. Talking to the Hindustan Times,he said that all the plantations play a crucial ecological role. We need tounderstand that the assessment of forest cover is done on the basis ofinterpretation of satellite data, which basically identifies theumbrella-shaped canopies from the sky, and it is not possible to discerndifferent species on imagery with spatial resolution of 23.5m. However, to makethings clear, the forest cover figures are further divided as “inside recordedforest area” and “outside recorded forest area”...This gives the impressionthat forests and plantations are of the same ecological value. What are yourthoughts on it? Do we really need to exclude plantations? Cashew plantations,which are mainly growing along the coast, serve as the first line of defenceagainst cyclones, which are now hitting with increased frequency... Mixedplantations, especially of native species, are meeting all the ecologicalfunctions of natural forests, and ground flora is taking over... While I do not advocate equating natural forests with plantations, at the same time, let us recognise their ecological functions too... 

Indian Scam of Forest Report?

On January 3, 2019, Business Standardwrote that “Doubts have been raised by a UN body over India’s claims that itsforest cover has been increasing steadily for years.” “Questions have beenraised by experts of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change at a timewhen future claims of increase and enrichment of India’s forest cover couldlead to potentially millions of dollars of easy income annually once the ParisAgreement is implemented. The global agreement envisions setting up a global mechanism for countries to trade in the greenhouse gas emissions avoided byeither growing more forests, enriching existing ones or”, the report said.After Madhusudan’s long twitter thread on the issue, the social media platformwas abuzz with condemnation. Some even termed it as “Indian scam of forest report”. 

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The forest survey estimates forest overusing automated algorithms to analyze satellite imagery – an approach thatfails to distinguish native forests from tree plantations which are oftenmonocultures of exotic species   that havelimited value   for endangeredbiodiversity and  tea estates  among others. Using an algorithm, the FSI researchers categorised the vegetated areainto different ‘classes’ based on the brightness of each pixel: ‘very dense’forest, ‘moderately dense’ forest and ‘open forest’ leading to the controversy. Very dense forests have a canopy density – the fraction covered by thecrowns of trees – greater than 70%. But FSI has used no clear relationship orancillary field dataset to arrive at this threshold, Srinivasan V, a seniorfellow at the Foundation for Ecological Research, Advocacy and Learning,Puducherry,  has been quoted in the media.The forest cover report for the first time assessed the forest cover in tiger reserves and corridors, and foundthat the total cover in 32 tiger reserves was 55,666 sq. km and in tigercorridors, 11,575 sq. km. This is also an eye wash, experts believe. Accordingto Srinivasan, there is no value in knowing the forest cover in tiger reserves,more so since the report doesn’t ascribe any ecological relevance to thisinformation. 

North East: Heading for Major Trouble

According to the report, the totalforest cover in India’s biodiversity-rich northeastern states has dropped by1,020 sq. km during 2019-21 . And the states that reported the five biggest drops in forest cover are Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur, Nagaland, Mizoram andMeghalaya . Among the eight states, Manipur recorded the largest loss in forestcover (249 sq kms), followed by Nagaland (235 sq kms) and Mizoram (186 sq kms).The report attributes this loss in forest cover to shifting cultivation, whichis practiced in many northeastern states. The northeastern states have beenlosing forest cover consistently, as the last report published in 2019 alsoindicated. Between 2011 and 2019, forest cover of six states, excluding Assam,had decreased by nearly 18 %  between2011 and 2019. The region lost nearly 25,012 sq km of forest cover in the preceding decade. The eight states account for 23.75 % of the country’s totalforest cover.

Representational Image