The story so far: The State of Forest Report (SFR) 2023 was released by Union Environment Minister Bhupender Yadav at the Forest Research Institute, Dehradun, on December 21, 2024. The SFR is a biennial exercise the Government of India undertakes to track tree and forest cover, carbon stock, forest fires, and other parameters related to the country’s green cover.
What did SFR 2023 find?
According to SFR 2023, 25.17% of India’s area is under forest and tree cover. Of this, forests cover 21.76% of land and trees 3.41%. These figures represent marginal increases from 21.71% and 2.91%, respectively, as reported in SFR 2021. In absolute terms, the increase is 1,445 sq. km.
The National Forest Policy 1988, which governs green cover in India, requires 33% of the country’s geographical area to be under tree or forest cover.
Chhattisgarh, Uttar Pradesh, and Odisha led the list of States that increased forest and tree cover while Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka, Ladakh (UT), and Nagaland were the top four States where forest and tree cover has dropped.
What is green cover?
Forest cover in India means an area of a hectare or more, “with a tree canopy of more than or equal to 10%, irrespective of ownership and legal status,” per the report.
Likewise, tree cover refers to all tree patches that exist outside of forest area and which occupy “less than one hectare in extent, including all the scattered trees found in the rural and urban settings, and [are] not captured under the forest cover assessment”.
The SFR uses a mix of satellite data and details from the National Forest Inventory, plus ground-truthing to verify the information. Forest cover estimates come from satellite data and growing and carbon stock estimates from the Inventory. The 2023 report uses satellite data from October to December 2021 and NFI data from 2017 to 2022.
How have sensitive areas fared?
In 2014, the national government first notified the Western Ghats Eco-Sensitive Area (WGESA) along the country’s west coast under the Environment Protection Act 1986 for special protection. According to SFR 2023, the Area has lost 58.22 sq. km of forests in the last decade. While the cover of “very dense” forests increased, those of “moderately dense” and “open” forests fell.
“Very dense” forests have a canopy density of at least 70%, “moderately dense” forests of 40-70%, and “open” forests of 10-40%.
The Nilgiris forests are part of the WGESA and a UNESCO biosphere. Between 2013 and 2023, they lost 123.44 sq. km of forest cover. The Nilgiris district also reported a fourfold increase in the number of forest fires from 2022-2023 to 2023-2024.
Mangroves — tropical trees in the intertidal zones of coastal areas — are withdrawing as well. The report has estimated 0.15% of India’s total geographical area is under mangrove cover following an overall decrease of 7.43 sq. km from 2021 alone. Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra increased their State-wise share but Gujarat’s Kutch area reported a significant decrease.
These trees stabilise coastlines, mitigate erosion, encourage biodiversity, shield coastal communities from sea-level rise, and temper the fury of cyclones.
The Northeast occupies less than 8% of India’s total land area but more than 21% of its tree and forest cover. Per SFR 2023, tree and forest cover in the region shrunk by 327.3 sq. km. There have been reports in the press that at least part of the decline is due to conversion of forests for agricultural use.
What is the SFR’s applicability?
While the definitions of green cover are straightforward, what they include or exclude has prompted concerns. For example, as trees became popular as a ‘solution’ for climate mitigation because of their ability to sequester carbon, many lawmakers as well as researchers began to tout tree-planting as a blanket fix.
In due course, some important problems emerged with this idea. For one, not all ecosystems are suited for trees, and damaging them by planting trees could have repercussions that negate the original purpose of the exercise. For another, only native and mature species in the right environments can sequester carbon efficiently. Young trees or those unsuitable for their environs either wouldn’t help as much or not at all.
One direct analogue in the SFRs is that the definition of forests includes “orchards, bamboo, and palm”. Divya Gupta, assistant professor of environmental studies and sustainable communities at the State University of New York, thus called the report’s marquee finding a “celebratory statistic”.
“By including plantations, orchards, palms, and non-native ecosystems, it erases the distinction between natural forests and monocultures,” she added. “This aggregation misrepresents forest health, obscures deforestation and degradation, and offers a distorted view of what we should truly prioritise.”
“The share of actual increase in forest cover appears to be very minimal … compared to the 1,445 sq. km of forest and green cover increase claimed in the document,” Sudeep Budhaditya Deb, deputy conservator of forests at the Office of the Additional Principal Chief Conservator of Forests (North Bengal), said.
How is India tracking forest fires?
During the 2023-2024 fire season, the Forest Survey of India dispatched more than 112.67 lakh SMS alerts to subscribers, SFR 2023 said. This alert system uses meteorological data from the Institute of Tropical Meteorology, Pune.
“India’s forest fire alert system is a commendable mechanism developed by the Indian Remote Sensing Agency,” Deb said. (The Indian Remote Sensing Agency is now part of the National Remote Sensing Centre.)
Of the alerts the Survey provides, the near-real-time ones are based on data recorded by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectro-radiometer sensor onboard NASA’s Aqua and Terra satellites and the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) onboard NOAA’s Suomi-NPP satellite.
Data from the Aqua and the Suomi-NPP satellites were recently implicated in an Indian controversy. As The Hindu reported, government officials had instructed rice farmers around the National Capital Region to postpone their stubble-burning activities to later in the day, once Aqua and Suomi-NPP had completed their overpass, so official records could inflate the effects of States’ efforts to phase out the burning.
According to SFR 2023, VIIRS detected 2.03 lakh fire hotspots, down from 2.23 lakh in 2021-2022 seasons and 2.12 lakh in 2022-2023.
However, the SFR doesn’t distinguish between ‘good fires’ that rejuvenate forests and fires that degrade them.
Is SFR related to climate action?
Exercises to understand how much carbon can be sequestered use the term carbon stock to denote all the carbon held in living and nonliving biomass in an ecosystem. In a mature forest, for example, the carbon collects in the trees as they grow both aboveground and below, in the leaf litter surrounding the trees, in the deadwood, etc.
In 2022, India committed to increase its carbon stock by 2.5-3 billion tonnes “through additional forest and tree cover by 2030”. The current stock of this variety is around 30.4 billion tonnes.
According to SFR 2023, India increased its carbon stock by 81.5 million tonnes and the growing stock — the sum (by number or volume) of all the trees living/growing in forests — by 4.25% between 2021 and 2023.
But experts have said the report doesn’t say anything about the quality of forests contributing to increases in forest cover nor provides data on the actual causes of forest degradation.
“Key ecological indicators such as forest fragmentation and biodiversity health are missing, making it impossible to evaluate the true significance of the statistics reported,” Gupta said. “Moreover, the report lacks mechanisms to track ecosystem losses caused by land-use changes and deforestation.”
Published – January 03, 2025 05:00 am IST
