Forest survey misses the wood for the trees

Expanding green cover in the country should normally be heartening, but the true story of India’s forests lies beyond the marginal growth in forest and tree cover recorded in the latest edition of the India State of Forest Report. To be sure, as the climate crisis unfolds, reafforestation figures high among mitigation efforts, and, against this backdrop, the 1,445 sq km of green cover in India that was added in the last two years matters. However, the fact that old-growth, natural forests continue to degrade while nearly the entire growth in forest cover is outside recorded forest areas — likely monoculture plantations and agroforestry — complicates the picture in the long run.

Consider the Western Ghats, the northeastern states, and the mangrove forests, which house a chunk of India’s old-growth, natural forests, with significant biodiversity and environmental roles (protecting the coastline and supporting diverse fauna). All of these have reported continuing losses. Meanwhile, reafforestation efforts have focussed on canopy gains, with either the 33% forest cover goal set by the National Forest Policy or the Bonn Challenge of 26 million hectares of forests by 2030 in mind. Predictably, this has pushed short-termism, with the loss of biodiversity-rich, old-growth forests intended to be offset by fast-growing species in monoculture plantations and agroforestry. Thanks to the species favoured in most reafforestation efforts, there have been reports of destabilising effects such as the decline in local water availability and loss of ecologically significant non-forest vegetation that yielded space to the plantations.

The need is to assess reafforestation efforts through the prism of preserving and furthering biodiversity and the imprint these have on the climate crisis through the long-term effects on the environment and the way the hydrological cycle is impacted.

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