Forests are more than just trees

In the first fifty years after independence, India is thought to have lost well over five million hectares of its forests. In sharp contrast, in the next 25 years, official figures reported a staggering eight million hectare increase in forest cover. This was despite the legal diversion of one million hectares of forest area to non-forest uses.

In 1987, India started assessing its forest cover in its biennial India State of Forest Reports (ISFR). Between 1987 and 1997, these reports documented a stable-to-declining trend in India’s forest cover. Suddenly, between the consecutive ISFR assessments of 1999 and 2001, India’s forest cover jumped by 3.8 million hectares. Given the biological impossibility that any land that was not a forest could become a forest in a mere two years, how did we produce such a dramatic increase in forest cover?

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We achieved that merely by changing what we defined as forest. From 2001, we began to count all areas with a mere 10% tree canopy density within a hectare as forest, regardless of who owned them, and even more startlingly, regardless of their actual present use. The ISFR now includes tea estates, coconut groves, dense suburban developments, and even tree-lined metropolitan boulevards as forest cover.

While these are indeed tree-clad spaces, they are, neither in aesthetic imagination nor in ecological function, remotely equivalent to natural forests. With a forest so disingenuously defined, we are today engaged in a dangerous calculus that equates a forest merely to carbon. This allows the trading of natural forest loss for gains we make in impoverished, tree-clad areas created through human action. Such misrepresentation gravely undermines not only the form and function of a forest but also its fundamental meaning.

(MD Madhusudan is an independent researcher and the co-founder of Nature Conservation Foundation.)