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- The latest ‘State of Forest’ report said India’s forest and tree cover increased by 2,261 sq. km between 2019 and 2021.
- But a new independent analysis suggests that the report doesn’t account for almost 26 million hectares of forest land.
- This is the latest in a string of discrepancies that independent experts have pointed out in the government report.
Kochi: The Forest Survey of India (FSI) recently said, based on the latest edition of its ‘state of forest’ report, that India’s forest cover has increased. But independent experts had called out the FSI for considering plantations as forests as well, thus potentially inflating India’s forest cover.
A new analysis by Sunita Narain, director-general of the Center for Science and Environment, New Delhi, provides an estimate of this inflation – almost 26 million hectares. This is roughly the area of Uttar Pradesh, India’s largest state.
The report used satellite data to estimate forest and tree cover in India. ‘Forest cover’ refers to forested areas of more than one hectare and a tree canopy density (fraction covered by the crowns of trees) of more than 10%.
This definition included plantations and orchards as well, even though they are not ‘forests’.
‘Tree cover’ refers to trees outside forests, such as along roads.
Per last year’s report, India’s total forest and tree cover (8.09 lakh sq. km) included tree cover of 0.95 lakh sq. km and forest cover of 7.13 lakh sq. km.
The report also distinguishes between ‘forest cover’ and ‘recorded forest area’. ‘Recorded forest area’ refers to all areas classified officially as forests by the government. These include reserved forests (forests declared by state governments and where some activities, like grazing, are banned by default) and protected forests, which are reserved forests where activities like grazing are permitted by default.
‘Unclassed forests’ are areas recorded as forests but not included in the reserved or protected forests category. They also come under recorded forest areas.
According to the latest report, the recorded forest area in India is 775.3 lakh hectares. But the same report says only 516.6 lakh hectares of recorded forest area has forest cover, Narain wrote. This means 258.7 lakh hectares of forest – or ~26 million, about a third of the recorded forest area – is “missing”.
“We have the assessment for only 66% of the recorded ‘forest’ area,” Narain wrote in her report. “The rest is unaccounted for.”
She added that in Madhya Pradesh, the difference between recorded forest area and forest cover is close to 32%). In Jharkhand, it’s 50%, and around 75% in Punjab, Chandigarh and Haryana. Twelve states are missing at least 30%. The report has apparently not accounted for these areas as scrubland either.
“In fact, one can say that the forest cover is growing in spite of [the] government, not because of it,” Narain wrote.
Dubious accounting has been a near-constant refrain with these forest survey reports of late.
Experts have highlighted flawed methods that allow ‘plantations’ to be classified as ‘forested areas’. FSI data isn’t in the public domain, however, so researchers haven’t been able to independently verify the body’s claims.