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There’s good news and bad news. The good news is that India’s forest cover grew, though marginally, between 2005 and 2007. The bad news is that it has declined in several states and union territories
‘India State of Forest Report 2009’, an exercise undertaken by the Dehra Dun-based Forest Survey of India, shows that a total of 78.37 million hectares of land -- or 23.84% of the country’s geographical area -- was under forest area in 2007. This is an increase of 0.18 million hectares, 0.23%, over 2005. Minister for Environment and Forests Jairam Ramesh, who released the report on November 30, 2009, said the accuracy of the data was 95.72% as, for the first time, remote sensors were used to map forests; the data was matched with information gathered on the ground. The information comes days ahead of the climate change summit in Copenhagen, where India will demand incentives for increasing forest cover and claim it has the potential to become the largest carbon sink in the world. According to the report, India’s forests absorb around 11% of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions. Between 1997 and 2007, India’s forest cover grew by 3.13 million hectares, a rise of 4.75%. Ramesh pointed out that while India’s forest cover had shown an average increase of 0.3 million hectares per year in the past one decade, countries like Brazil and Indonesia had seen their forests reduce at the rate of about 2.5 million hectares per year in the same period. Brazil and Indonesia have been pushing for monetary support for countries that reduce deforestation, as forests act as global carbon sinks. India has proposed similar compensation for increasing forest cover. But what’s worrying environmentalists in India is that about 40% of the country’s total forest cover is degraded open forest. The assessment shows that between 2005 and 2007, India gained 1,626 sq km of open forest and 38 sq km of very dense forest. But it lost 936 sq km of moderately dense forest. Moreover, 16 states lost forest cover between 2005 and 2007, the report says, listing the greatest losses in Andhra Pradesh, Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Chhattisgarh, and Nagaland. It says mining in Chhattisgarh, encroachment in insurgency-affected areas of Assam and Chhattisgarh, and shifting cultivation in Arunachal Pradesh and Nagaland are among the factors that caused forest area to shrink. “So far we’ve been paying too much attention to quantity and not to quality,” Ramesh conceded. While the assessments are a once-in-two-years exercise, the minister said there was a need to introduce more frequent assessments of ecologically sensitive areas such as the forests of central India, the northeast, and the Western Ghats. Source: The Indian Express, December 1, 2009
DNA, December 1, 2009
The Telegraph, December 1, 2009
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