New Delhi: While the latest India State of Forest Report has indicated an increase in the country’s green cover, experts have said that the use of inaccurate methodologies to define forests might be giving an overly optimistic view of the ground reality.
On Saturday, the Union Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC) released the State of Forests Report by the Forest Survey of India (FSI). The report highlighted that India’s total forest and tree cover was 827,357 sq km, which accounted for 25.17 percent of the country’s total geographical area—an increase of 3.41 percent since 2021.
Usually released biennially, the report primarily relies on satellite data to map forest lands and non-forest green cover. According to officials from the FSI (FSI), satellite images are first run through digital image processing (DIP) software, where radiometric defects are removed to improve the clarity of visuals.
Areas where land changes appear to have occurred since the last survey are identified and teams then conduct ground checks to confirm the satellite findings.
Experts, however, said that satellites with low precision often tend to present an inaccurate picture.
FSI uses the Linear Imaging Self Scanning Sensor-3 with a resolution of 23.5 m, which means land cover with a geometric dimension on the ground of less than that is not discernible.
Weather, agriculture plantations too close to forest lands, and large shrubs—often mistaken for full-grown trees—are some of the other limitations of the survey.
“No methodology is 100 percent accurate, but we have improved the accuracy of our surveys. Extensive ground surveys also back our satellite monitoring,” said a senior official from the environment ministry.
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Disappearing forests
In 2021, when the last forest report was released, the Centre for Science and Environment, a Delhi-based environmental think tank, conducted an analysis and found that 25.87 million hectares of India’s forests were “missing”.
The analysis said that there was a difference between what was recorded as a forest area and the actual forest cover in that recorded area.
In the 2021 FSI report, 77.53 million hectares (775,300 sq km) of land were marked as forest area. However, the actual forest cover on these lands was found to be only 51.66 million ha (516,600 sq km). According to the CSE assessment, as much as 34 percent of the area classified as forests was missing.
“Nowhere in the report has the FSI explained where this difference of over 25 million ha is,” said Sunita Narain, CSE’s director general.
Other experts also pointed to how plantations and agricultural land were being classified as forests.
Wildlife biologist and conservationist M.D. Madhusudan said that government agencies were playing around with the lack of clarity in defining forest lands.
“The definitions of forest area and forest cover are not very clearly stated or followed. If you cut down a forest and have a tea plantation, it is not classified as deforestation because it was forested earlier and identified as a forest even now. We have lost the vocabulary to describe this change,” Madhusudan said.
Difference in data
The Global Forest Watch data, which provides forest data for countries across the world, also showed a different picture. For instance, according to GFW data from 2002 to 2023, India lost 414 kilo hectares of humid primary forests, making up 18 percent of its total tree cover loss in the same period.
According to this data, between 2001 and 2023, India also lost 2.33 million ha (23,300 sq km) of tree cover.
GFW’s findings are based on the global standards set by the Food and Agriculture Organization, which focus on criteria such as tree height, canopy cover, and biophysical attributes.
Officials from the environment ministry said that the difference in the two reports—GFW and ISFR—could be because of how the two agencies define forest and tree cover.
“The global forest watch only focuses on humid primary forests, while our agencies have a broader definition of forests. These reports also fail to account for the reality on the ground,” the environment ministry official said.
(Edited by Sanya Mathur)
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