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India ranked third globally in average net forest gain during 2010-2020, but questions are being raised on its forest data by independent experts, and even the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), for mixing plantations with natural forests.
Since 1981, the country’s population has nearly doubled, its livestock numbers have increased by more than a quarter and at least 25,000 sq km of forest land have either been diverted or encroached. In that period, India has also recorded, on paper, a net forest cover gain of over 73,000 sq km – one and half times the size of Punjab.
“This haphazard exercise of raising plantations and random green patches to compensate for forests that are hacked down as a matter of policy cannot work. Yet, successive governments claim that manmade plantations can indeed offset biodiverse forests lost to development projects,” Bittu Sahgal, who served in multiple expert panels of the Environment ministry, told The Indian Express.
Asked on the absence of data on the loss of natural forests and the incremental role of plantations behind the stability in India’s forest cover, Anoop Singh, Director General of Forest Survey of India, declined comment, saying he was not authorised to speak to the media.
Dr Subhash Ashutosh, Singh’s predecessor in FSI, said “reading between the lines” can reveal a lot in the forest reports.
“It is quite apparent that plantations are replacing natural forests within the overall stability of our forest cover. We can quantify this specific matrix. But more than interpreting the data, it is a matter of the government’s policy on how we approach the issue to find a balance between conservation and development,” he said.
Since the Forest Conservation Act was enacted in 1980, at least 10,000 sq km of forests have been lost to diversion for development projects. In 2021, the government initiated the process of amending the Act “to effectively fit into the present circumstances, particularly for accelerated integration of conservation and development”.
The proposed amendments seek to limit the scope of application of the Act, exempt certain activities from requiring permission for clearing forests and allow raising and harvesting private plantations on forest land etc.
While India maintains that its forest cover definition has been accepted by the UN – since the Kyoto Protocol allowed that flexibility “depending upon the capacities and capabilities” of a country – the UNFCCC has flagged India’s data for assuming that new forests (plantations) reach the carbon stock level of existing forests in eight years which led “to an overestimation of the carbon sink in the soil organic carbon pool”.
In May 2018, India submitted a modified Forest Reference Level (FRL) to the UN’s Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD+) – a scheme to put a value to the stored carbon to incentivise developing countries – after the UNFCCC’s technical assessment team sought certain clarifications regarding the first draft presented in January that year.
In October 2018, the UNFCCC concluded that “the data and information used by India in constructing its FRL are partially transparent and not complete” and sought, among other things, “a complete and individual assessment of areas of orchards, bamboos and palms, in line with the forest definition, thus allowing a more accurate estimation of carbon stocks”.
Earlier, in 2015, India pledged to create an additional carbon sink of 2.5 to 3 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent through additional forest and tree cover by 2030 as part of its Intended Nationally Determined Contribution (INDC).
In 2015, India’s forest carbon was 29.62 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent – already a jump of over 1.5 billion tonnes in a decade since 2005, the baseline year also for the GDP emission intensity target.
In 2019, an FSI technical paper projected that India will comfortably surpass its carbon commitment by 2030 “without implementing additional measures per se for increasing forest carbon sink”.
But if the “additional” in India’s commitment is interpreted as over and above the business-as-usual levels, pointed out Ashutosh, meeting the carbon target would become near impossible. “Nobody in the government wants to venture into that zone,” he said.
