Lost: One-third of India's recorded forest
25.87 million hectares: This is a measure of forest lost from India's latest green space estimate. Does this country exist? Did you take it? Or getting worse, so damaged that there is no forest to count here?
About four decades ago, in the mid-1980s, the National Remote Monitoring Agency, Hyderabad, produced a report on India's forest cover using satellite imagery. The information compared forest cover between 1972-75 and 1980-82 and found that the country lost 1.3 million hectares (ha) of forest annually over the seven years.
This estimate is much higher than the Forestry Service estimates each year and has surprised the country. For the first time, the status of forest cover was examined visually from the sky, showing a decline.
It encourages action and promotes nature conservation and greenery in the country. Recently, the Forest Survey of India (FSI), Dehradun, was commissioned to assess the country's forest wealth every two years.
Such reports are important because they reflect the health of forests, which are critical for a country like India to be vital to livelihoods, economic growth, and carbon sequestration – in that order. Unfortunately, the poorest live in most of the country's forests.
Since 1988, when the FSI issued the first Forest State Report in 1987, satellite capabilities and forest interpretation have improved significantly, but forest cover in the country has not. Let me explain. Forest quality also appears to be stable. There was some increase in the "very dense" forest category (over 70 percent cover) and the "open" forest category (10-40 percent shade cover), and a similar decrease in moderately dense forest. Forest category (Shadow coverage 40-70%).
You could argue that this is not worth analyzing - criticism or praise. But the facts are:
- Outside registered forest areas (forest areas under the control of state government forest departments), there is now more forest growing than inside
- Most of the forest is now concentrated in areas classified as "tribal areas" under ISFR 2021
- Reported forest area increases by counting trees outside the forest
- Forest stock also grows outside the registered forest area. Let's analyze one by one.
- Forests that grow "outside" and "outside."
As part of ISFR 2015, a forest cover assessment outside a registered forest area was conducted first. In other words, this is the first out-of-state forest assessment report under the control of the state forest government.
In the absence of a state forest line, this was done first by extracting a topographical sheet from the Survey of India containing areas designated as "green laundry"—shown in green—corresponding to the "total forest area recorded in the country."
In this way, the assessment can distinguish between the forest inside and outside the registered area. In addition, by the time ISFR 2021 was released, 24 forestry departments provided digital timber trails in their records, further increasing this score.
ISFR 2021 shows that almost 28 percent of forest area is outside the registered forest area. About 12% of the very dense forest category also lies outside the listed sites. The report also shows that the increase in forest cover between 2019 and 2021 was mainly due to growth outside the registered areas.
While forest cover in registered forest areas increased slightly, the increase outside of it was 0.76 percent.