Missing the forest for the trees
An analysis of rising forest cover in India State of Forest Reports, 1987–2021
Despite successive India State of Forest Reports (ISFR) claiming rising forest cover, there is little evidence to show that India’s natural forest cover has actually increased. In fact, it has very likely declined. The purported gains come largely from FSI’s problematic and perverse redefinition of ‘forest’ to include tea gardens, coconut plantations, urban built-up areas, native grasslands wrecked by invasive trees, and even treeless desert scrub.
Since 1987, India has assessed its forest cover every two years in its India State of Forest Reports (ISFR), produced by the Forest Survey of India (FSI). The 17th ISFR was released last week.
Here I take a closer look at the entire stack of ISFR reports:
The ISFR reports present lots of stats, but in this thread, I focus on the headline statistic: trends in India’s total forest cover over time.
So, let’s go… here, in one graph, is a 35-year summary of the official line on India’s forest cover: from 1999, it has been nonstop good news.
India’s forest cover declined until 1997, after which it rose an whopping 45,000 km² — an area greater in extent of Kerala state, or the country of Denmark — over the next three reports. Two key changes made in the 2001 assessment contributed to this: FSI adopted a fully digital analysis workflow, and it dramatically changed its definition of a forest (more on this soon).
The ISFRs, bizarrely, don’t just report forest cover for a new assessment year, but often go back and tweak forest cover values of previous years. In 2005, they reduced the 2001 estimate c. 22,000 km² (6 times the land area of Goa!). In 2009, they hiked the 2005 estimate by c. 13,000 km².
The FSI’s logic for such “harmonisation” is vague, at best. Technological and methodological changes to the forest assessment process, upsold in 2001 as improvements in accuracy—yielding a 38,000 km² increase in forest cover—are casually brushed off as wrong interpretations in 2005, leading to a 22,000 km² decrease in forest cover. This is like trying to make sense of the health of a company with an accounting system where closing balances of previous years are tweaked — sometimes multiple times — in subsequent years with neither explanation or consequence.
Reports are not data… maps are
Now, let’s see how the ISFR numbers in the report stand up to closer scrutiny.
Let’s take Sonitpur in Assam, where rapid and huge forest losses occurred between 1996 and 2006. Surely, the ISFRs, claiming high accuracy of forest cover estimation, should’ve this nailed, right?
Nope! If you pull out the numbers on forest cover for Sonitpur District from ISFRs, they show an utterly mystifying increase in forest cover in the district during a period when the devastating forest loss it experienced is plainly visible in publicly-available satellite imagery. Watch the short video below to see how absurd it is that the forest cover statistics put out by the FSI for Sonitpur has no relationship whatsoever with the catastrophic forest loss this district experienced.
As early as 2002, even as the FSI was just beginning to generate its fictitious numbers showing that forest cover in Sonitpur had increased, in another part of the same city, Dehradun, where FSI is based, researchers at the Indian Institute of Remote Sensing were desperately trying to sound the alarm on an alarming drop in forest cover in Sonitpur. Below is a paper they published in Current Science in 2002, reporting a loss of over 14,000 hectares of forest between 1999 and 2001, a period over which the FSI reported a gain in forest cover of over 50,000 hectares!
So, what are the ISFRs counting as forest cover to generate their flattering figures? Besides technical changes made to satellite imagery analysis, in 2001, the FSI completely rewrote the definition of a forest: so long as a mere 10% of a hectare of land had trees, it was forest (see below).
That the new definition of forest would lead to an increase in areas being counted as forest was clear. But what land cover types might it include on the ground, or how valid was their inclusion as forests, remained extremely hard even for experienced field researchers to assess.
This is because the ISFR, despite being publicly-funded, has NEVER EVER released its maps publicly. It’s critical to see here that maps — and not the reports — are the real, verifiable data from the ISFR assessments. Reports are mere dossiers of FSI’s claims on what the data contain.
I have tweeted earlier about the travesty in the FSI selling its publicly-funded assessment data at a ludicrous price of ₹2,000 per 1°x1° tile, per assessment. If available at all, at this price, the entire time-series data stack would cost upwards of ₹ 50L to buy!
Significantly, FSI continues to hold out and not part with its map data, making complete mockery of an extremely progressive geospatial map data policy recently put out by the Government of India.
See: Final Approved Guidelines on Geospatial Data.pdf
Thankfully, another GoI website recently publicly put out map data from a recent ISFR assessment. In over 25 years of trying in vain to steal a glance at a forest cover map produced by FSI, I was finally able to see for myself what it looked like! So, let’s take a look.
What the ISFRs count as forest
Looking at Sonitpur on the FSI map (below) , it turned out that their report was counting thousands of hectares of private tea gardens around Rangapara as forest. But could this be an excusable, one-off lapse? Let’s see if the map does better in other tea areas…
In Naxalbari of West Bengal too, the ISFR treats tea estates as forest. Not just that, they also designate some tea as Open Forest, some as Moderately Dense Forest, and some tea and human settlements as Very Dense Forest. Not good, but let’s continue…
In Valparai of Tamil Nadu, nearly 2,000 km away, again, tea is counted as forest. In a landscape where priceless wet-evergreen forests were destroyed some 150 years ago to plant tea and coffee, it is beyond ironical that India is now calling the tea estates themselves as forest!
A little to the north of Valparai, an intensive agricultural landscape around Pollachi town dominated by coconut is almost entirely counted as forest. Again, a large fraction of these coconut areas are classified as Moderately Dense Forests
It should come as no surprise at all then that the remote islands of Lakshadweep, with little other than coconut trees and human dwellings, leads the nation in forest cover, with > 90% of its land area under forest, while also supporting over 2,000 people per square kilometre!
If densely settled areas as Kavaratti in Lakshadweep are forests, we must surely check for forests that might be lurking in plain sight in our metros. Sure enough, here’s one in Kolkata: all it takes are a few dozen trees in a heavily built-up area for the FSI count it as forest.
Turns out, the very abodes and workplaces of India’s highest constitutional functionaries too are ensconced in the Open to Moderately Dense Forests of Lutyens Delhi. Which would make our leaders forest dwellers, right?
On a total lark, I decided to look for forests in the deserts of Jaisalmer. And found them too! Whatever else our criticism of the FSI, they certainly can’t be accused of favouring only tree-clad areas in counting India’s forests.
Finally, I looked at areas of Kutch, where Prosopis — one of the world’s worst invasive plants — has taken over open natural ecosystems. Sure enough, the FSI was generously counting this invasive from faraway lands — and a biodiversity conservation nightmare for India — also as forest.
Are these egregious examples of forest cover “wrongly interpreted” on account of “radiometric and geometric errors of satellite data”?
Unlikely.
See (below) how much better maps of the National Remote Sensing Centre (NRSC) are at telling natural forests from tea and coconut.
Earlier too, ecologists have feared a deliberate misreporting of plantations as forests, and shown that subtracting gains made in India’s plantations, its claimed forest cover is in actual decline (below). More recently, there is continuing research to show a huge greening trend for India, mostly under croplands (including agricultural plantations). From the images above, it is clearly evident that it is this gain in tree cover outside natural forests that is being represented by the FSI as India’s forest cover increase.
Why misrepresent forests?
So, from all available evidence, it would seem that the ISFR’s counting of tea gardens, coconut plantations, built-up areas, and even desert scrub, as forest is no accident. It seems a rather considered and deliberate stance. But how does such a stance even make sense?
FIRST: every government wants to divert forests for energy, infrastructure and industry. To do so even when forests are in decline is publicly indefensible. Instead, by redefining forests to include various human land-uses, we ensure that both forest cover and diversions can rise. Who could be against an increased diversion of forests if it can be shown that forest cover too is increasing? This, in fact, seems to be the one chart that our MoEFCC has been standardising regardless of who is in power.
On the other hand, alternate assessments of India’s forest cover from sources that are institutionally more independent (than the FSI is from the MoEFCC) present a very different picture: rising forest diversions, unsurprisingly, seem go with declining natural forest cover.
SECOND: a large and rising forest cover offers bright prospects in global carbon trade, where countries adding forest cover could trade their carbon gains to offset emissions of other countries for money. India, understandably, is trying to cash in by claiming vast forest expanse and huge year-on-year growth.
But, the world is not ready to buy our claims without scrutiny (see news story below). If India continues to trot out dubious figures on forest cover, it risks a serious loss of credibility in its leadership in the global debate on equity in lowering the carbon intensity of the global economy.
Why we must care about what is counted as forest
But, so what? Why must citizens care about a redefinition of forests?
Natural forests hold vaster and more varied values to biodiversity and communities than any land cover created by humans. While plantations and other human created landscapes may contain trees, they simply are incomparable to natural forests in terms of the sheer variety and volume of various goods and services they provide. To lose a real, natural forests is not the same as losing a plantation. See (below) what has happened in Sonitpur following its catastrophic forest loss: both elephants and humans are today locked in a worsening conflict triggered largely by a destruction of natural forests where the elephants lived.
Further, in the midst of a pandemic, we must also recognise that the loss of natural forests can have catastrophic downstream effects on human public health. In Sonitpur (below), malaria rose eight-fold in areas that had experienced forest loss. Losing forests can mean losing lives.
Neither of these serious consequences for wildlife and people are ever averted by redefining forests or by massaging numbers. We must recognise, count and value natural forests as such, and our tea-estates and verdant boulevards for what they are: tree-clad non-forest areas. Conflating one for the other is a dangerous deception.
Finally, forests are a public resource. And similarly, reliable civic data too — especially on key indicators such as natural forest cover — are a public good.
To thrive, every society needs — and must demand — more and better of both.
