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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | India's forest cover: What data shows -Arjun Srinivas

India's forest cover: What data shows -Arjun Srinivas

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published Published on Jul 5, 2018   modified Modified on Jul 5, 2018
-Livemint.com

A Mint analysis shows the Forest Survey of India estimate may be grossly overstating the true extent of forest cover in Delhi, and in India

Mumbai:
The Delhi high court will hear a petition challenging the felling of 16,000 trees to build houses for government employees in Delhi on Wednesday. The hearing comes in the wake of growing protests over the felling of 16,000 trees. On the face of it, the protests appear surprising in a city which has claimed to have witnessed a spectacular rise in green cover since the turn of the 21st century. According to official estimates of the Forest Survey of India, Delhi has witnessed a whopping 73% rise in forest cover between 2001 and 2017, the third highest gain among all states and Union territories (UTs).

However, a Mint analysis of official and alternative estimates suggests that the Forest Survey of India estimate may be grossly overstating the true extent of forest cover in the national capital, and in the nation.

While the official data suggests that India has been able to increase green cover since the turn of the century, alternative estimates provided by Global Forest Watch, (GFW) —a collaborative project of the University of Maryland, Google, USGS, and Nasa—suggests that green cover has declined sharply in the country.

The main reason for the stark difference in the two estimates seems to lie in the definition of forest cover used by Forest Survey of India.

Forest Survey of India employs satellite imagery to estimate “forest cover”, considering “all lands which have a tree canopy density of more than 10% when projected vertically on the horizontal ground, within a minimum areal extent of one hectare” as forests. This definition fails to distinguish between native forests and man-made tree plantations, overstating the extent of forest cover. While the Convention on Biological Diversity has a similar definition of forests, it mentions that the land in question should not be under agricultural or non-forest use.

A 2010 study by researchers from Pondicherry University and James Cook University, Australia, described the Forest Survey of India results as “technically accurate but misleading”.

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Livemint.com, 4 July, 2018, https://www.livemint.com/Politics/jUW0iY07OS0mRMi1gI5YzH/India-forest-cover-What-data-shows.html


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