What do the State of Forest Report 2023 findings imply? | Defined

The story to this point: The State of Forest Report (SFR) 2023 was launched by Union Atmosphere Minister Bhupender Yadav on the Forest Analysis Institute, Dehradun, on December 21, 2024. The SFR is a biennial train the Authorities of India undertakes to trace tree and forest cowl, carbon inventory, forest fires, and different parameters associated to the nation’s inexperienced cowl.

What did SFR 2023 discover?

In accordance with SFR 2023, 25.17% of India’s space is underneath forest and tree cowl. Of this, forests cowl 21.76% of land and timber 3.41%. These figures signify marginal will increase from 21.71% and a couple of.91%, respectively, as reported in SFR 2021. In absolute phrases, the rise is 1,445 sq. km.

The Nationwide Forest Coverage 1988, which governs inexperienced cowl in India, requires 33% of the nation’s geographical space to be underneath tree or forest cowl.

Chhattisgarh, Uttar Pradesh, and Odisha led the checklist of States that elevated forest and tree cowl whereas Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka, Ladakh (UT), and Nagaland had been the highest 4 States the place forest and tree cowl has dropped.

What’s inexperienced cowl?

Forest cowl in India means an space of a hectare or extra, “with a tree cover of greater than or equal to 10%, regardless of possession and authorized standing,” per the report.

Likewise, tree cowl refers to all tree patches that exist exterior of forest space and which occupy “lower than one hectare in extent, together with all of the scattered timber discovered within the rural and concrete settings, and [are] not captured underneath the forest cowl evaluation”.

The SFR makes use of a mixture of satellite tv for pc information and particulars from the Nationwide Forest Stock, plus ground-truthing to confirm the data. Forest cowl estimates come from satellite tv for pc information and rising and carbon inventory estimates from the Stock. The 2023 report makes use of satellite tv for pc information from October to December 2021 and NFI information from 2017 to 2022.

How have delicate areas fared?

In 2014, the nationwide authorities first notified the Western Ghats Eco-Delicate Space (WGESA) alongside the nation’s west coast underneath the Atmosphere Safety Act 1986 for particular safety. In accordance with SFR 2023, the Space has misplaced 58.22 sq. km of forests within the final decade. Whereas the quilt of “very dense” forests elevated, these of “reasonably dense” and “open” forests fell.

“Very dense” forests have a cover density of at the very least 70%, “reasonably dense” forests of 40-70%, and “open” forests of 10-40%.

The Nilgiris forests are a part of the WGESA and a UNESCO biosphere. Between 2013 and 2023, they misplaced 123.44 sq. km of forest cowl. The Nilgiris district additionally reported a fourfold enhance within the variety of forest fires from 2022-2023 to 2023-2024.

Mangroves — tropical timber within the intertidal zones of coastal areas — are withdrawing as properly. The report has estimated 0.15% of India’s whole geographical space is underneath mangrove cowl following an general lower of seven.43 sq. km from 2021 alone. Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra elevated their State-wise share however Gujarat’s Kutch space reported a major lower.

These timber stabilise coastlines, mitigate erosion, encourage biodiversity, protect coastal communities from sea-level rise, and mood the fury of cyclones.

The Northeast occupies lower than 8% of India’s whole land space however greater than 21% of its tree and forest cowl. Per SFR 2023, tree and forest cowl within the area shrunk by 327.3 sq. km. There have been experiences within the press that at the very least a part of the decline is because of conversion of forests for agricultural use.

What’s the SFR’s applicability?

Whereas the definitions of inexperienced cowl are easy, what they embrace or exclude has prompted considerations. For instance, as timber turned in style as a ‘resolution’ for local weather mitigation due to their means to sequester carbon, many lawmakers in addition to researchers started to tout tree-planting as a blanket repair.

In the end, some necessary issues emerged with this concept. For one, not all ecosystems are suited to timber, and damaging them by planting timber may have repercussions that negate the unique objective of the train. For an additional, solely native and mature species in the appropriate environments can sequester carbon effectively. Younger timber or these unsuitable for his or her environs both wouldn’t assist as a lot or in no way.

One direct analogue within the SFRs is that the definition of forests consists of “orchards, bamboo, and palm”. Divya Gupta, assistant professor of environmental research and sustainable communities on the State College of New York, thus referred to as the report’s marquee discovering a “celebratory statistic”.

“By together with plantations, orchards, palms, and non-native ecosystems, it erases the excellence between pure forests and monocultures,” she added. “This aggregation misrepresents forest well being, obscures deforestation and degradation, and gives a distorted view of what we must always really prioritise.”

“The share of precise enhance in forest cowl seems to be very minimal … in comparison with the 1,445 sq. km of forest and inexperienced cowl enhance claimed within the doc,” Sudeep Budhaditya Deb, deputy conservator of forests on the Workplace of the Extra Principal Chief Conservator of Forests (North Bengal), stated.

How is India monitoring forest fires?

In the course of the 2023-2024 hearth season, the Forest Survey of India dispatched greater than 112.67 lakh SMS alerts to subscribers, SFR 2023 stated. This alert system makes use of meteorological information from the Institute of Tropical Meteorology, Pune.

“India’s forest hearth alert system is a commendable mechanism developed by the Indian Distant Sensing Company,” Deb stated. (The Indian Distant Sensing Company is now a part of the Nationwide Distant Sensing Centre.)

Of the alerts the Survey supplies, the near-real-time ones are based mostly on information recorded by the  Reasonable Decision Imaging Spectro-radiometer sensor onboard NASA’s Aqua and Terra satellites and the Seen Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) onboard NOAA’s Suomi-NPP satellite tv for pc.

Information from the Aqua and the Suomi-NPP satellites had been lately implicated in an Indian controversy. As The Hindu reported, authorities officers had instructed rice farmers across the Nationwide Capital Area to postpone their stubble-burning actions to later within the day, as soon as Aqua and Suomi-NPP had accomplished their overpass, so official information may inflate the results of States’ efforts to part out the burning.

In accordance with SFR 2023, VIIRS detected 2.03 lakh hearth hotspots, down from 2.23 lakh in 2021-2022 seasons and a couple of.12 lakh in 2022-2023.

Nonetheless, the SFR doesn’t distinguish between ‘good fires’ that rejuvenate forests and fires that degrade them.

Is SFR associated to local weather motion?

Workouts to know how a lot carbon might be sequestered use the time period carbon inventory to indicate all of the carbon held in dwelling and nonliving biomass in an ecosystem. In a mature forest, for instance, the carbon collects within the timber as they develop each aboveground and under, within the leaf litter surrounding the timber, within the deadwood, and many others.

In 2022, India dedicated to extend its carbon inventory by 2.5-3 billion tonnes “by means of extra forest and tree cowl by 2030”. The present inventory of this selection is round 30.4 billion tonnes.

In accordance with SFR 2023, India elevated its carbon inventory by 81.5 million tonnes and the rising inventory — the sum (by quantity or quantity) of all of the timber dwelling/rising in forests  — by 4.25% between 2021 and 2023.

However consultants have stated the report doesn’t say something concerning the high quality of forests contributing to will increase in forest cowl nor supplies information on the precise causes of forest degradation.

“Key ecological indicators reminiscent of forest fragmentation and biodiversity well being are lacking, making it not possible to judge the true significance of the statistics reported,” Gupta stated. “Furthermore, the report lacks mechanisms to trace ecosystem losses attributable to land-use adjustments and deforestation.”