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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | In Fact: Why India doesn't lose forest cover -Jay Mazoomdaar

In Fact: Why India doesn't lose forest cover -Jay Mazoomdaar

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published Published on Feb 15, 2018   modified Modified on Feb 15, 2018
-The Indian Express

Despite deforestation and human encroachment, the country’s forest cover has remained stable around 20% since Independence. This is because the loss of natural old-growth forests is compensated on paper by expanding monoculture plantations.

Since Independence, a fifth of India’s land has consistently been under forests. The population has increased more than three times since 1947, and from 1951-80, a total 42,380 sq km of forestland was diverted — some 62% of it for agriculture. And yet, the country’s forest cover continues to hover just over 20%.

The India State of Forest Report 2017, released by the Forest Survey of India earlier this week, recorded that the forest cover had increased by 6,600 sq km — 0.21% — since 2015. For the first time since 2007, the biennial report recorded an increase of 5,198 sq km in “dense forest” (including Very Dense Forest, with a tree canopy density of 70% and above; and Moderately Dense Forest, with a tree canopy density of 40% and more, but less than 70%).

These are happy numbers, considering India’s forest cover increased by only 67,454 sq km since the FSI’s first survey in 1987. Significantly, the latest biennial increase (2015-17) in dense forest is over 10% of the overall gains — 49,105 sq km — in dense forest made over four decades.

It’s green, but is it forest?

Given the relentless pressure on forestland, what makes such stability, even growth, in forest cover possible?

One, the FSI uses satellite images to identify green cover as forest, and does not discriminate between natural forests, plantations, thickets of weeds such as juliflora and lantana, and longstanding commercial crops such as palm, coconut, coffee, or even sugarcane.

Two, in the 1980s, satellite imagery mapped forests on a scale of 1:1 million, and thus missed details of land units smaller than 4 sq km. The significantly refined 1:50,000 scale now scans patches as small as 1 hectare (100 m x 100 m), and any unit that shows a 10% canopy density is considered ‘forest’. So, millions of tiny plots that earlier went unnoticed, now contribute to India’s official forest cover.

The results are interesting. For example, the first FSI report recorded only 15 sq km of forests in Delhi, while the latest report found 192 sq km — a 13-fold increase in 30 years. Nearly a third of the current cover is recorded as ‘dense’. Similarly, highly agricultural Punjab and Haryana have managed to add more than 1,000 sq km each of forests since the 1980s.

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The Indian Express, 15 February, 2018, http://indianexpress.com/article/explained/why-india-doesnt-lose-forest-cover-5064362/


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