Explained: The Great Indian Tree Cover Loss

New Delhi: On May 20, the National Green Tribunal (NGT) took up an important case, suo motu (“on its own motion”): it asked the union government — including the environment ministry — to explain why India has lost a whopping 2.33 million hectares of tree cover between 2000 and 2023.

The Wire explains what this suo motu case is, what caused the apex green court to take it up, and why this marks an important juncture in India’s fight to protect its environment.

What is the case about?

On April 13, the Indian Express published a news report titled “India lost 2.33 million hectares of tree cover since 2000: Global Forest Watch”.

The news report (republished from the news agency, Press Trust of India) quoted data presented by the Global Forest Watch (GFW) on the status of tree cover loss in India.

The GFW is an online platform that provides real-time data (from sources including satellite imagery) on how forest cover is changing across the world, as well as tools for monitoring them. Here are the main findings pertaining to India that the GFW data indicated, which were quoted by the news report:

• India has lost a whopping 2.33 million hectares of tree cover between 2000 and 2023. That’s an area slightly more than the size of the entire state of Meghalaya.
• Around 18 per cent (4,14,000 hectares) of this tree cover loss occurred in humid primary forests in the country.
• Tree cover in northeast India bore the brunt — five states in this region made up for a shocking 60 per cent of all tree cover loss between 2001 and 2023. Here’s a list of how much area of tree over these states lost:

• From 2013 to 2023 – a period that covers almost the entire two terms of the National Democratic Alliance led by the Bharatiya Janata Party – as much as 95 per cent of the entire tree cover loss in the country occurred within natural forests.
• The years of 2016, 2017 and 2023 were particularly bad. India lost 1,75,000 hectares of tree cover in 2016 and 1,44,000 hectares in 2023. The year 2017 witnessed the maximum tree cover loss, at 1,89,000 hectares.
• The tree cover loss across the country has emitted a huge amount of carbon into the atmosphere – exactly what India is trying to prevent as per its Nationally Determined Contributions as submitted to the United Nations under the Paris Agreement. As per the news report, India’s tree cover loss released an average of 51.0 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent per year. In total, between 2000 and 2023, India emitted a staggering 1.12 gigatons of carbon dioxide equivalent due to tree cover loss.

However, the report also quotes the GFW as noting that comparisons across years (especially before and after 2015) should be interpreted with caution due to slight changes in the methodology of reporting data.

What did the NGT do?

A three-member corum consisting of Justices Prakash Srivastava (the Chairperson of the NGT) and Arun Kumar Tyagi (a judicial member of the NGT), and expert member Senthil Vel took up the issue of the loss of tree cover in India suo motu on May 20.

They noted that this loss of tree cover indicates the violation of the provisions of three environmental laws: the Forest Conservation Act, 1980, the Air (Prevention and Control of Pollution) Act, 1981 and the Environment Protection Act, 1986.

“The news item raises substantial issue relating to compliance of the environmental norms and implementation of the provisions of scheduled enactment,” the NGT noted.

Summoning its suo motu powers (the power to take up cases on its own accord without necessarily receiving a petition from a citizen, as per the National Green Tribunal Act of 2010), the NGT has asked three departments, institutes and ministries under the central government to explain this loss in India’s forest cover. The Tribunal has issued notices to the Member Secretary of the Central Pollution Control Board, the Secretary of the Ministry of Environment and Forest, and the Director of the Survey of India (based in Dehradun, Uttarakhand) to submit their responses on the issue. The Survey of India is the national survey and mapping organization of the country and comes under the Ministry of Science and Technology.

The Tribunal also asked the Director of the Survey of India to “submit a report showing the position of forest cover in India with specific reference to northeast from the year 2000 onwards with each five year interval covering the period upto March, 2024”.

The Director has to file this report at least one week before the next date of hearing — which the NGT has scheduled for August 28 this year.

Why is this significant? 

This move by the NGT — taking up suo motu cognisance of the loss of tree cover across India — is significant for several reasons.

One is that the NGT has cited that the loss of tree cover is a violation of the Forest Conservation Act (1980), or FCA, in its order. While the FCA is one of India’s most important legislations that protects forest cover in India, the union government has drastically diluted several provisions of the Act recently. Last year, union environment minister Bhupender Yadav introduced the Forest Conservation (Amendment) Act in the Lok Sabha in March. It met with much resistance from various quarters: from scientists, conservationists, retired civil servants, activists and citizens. Yet, the union government pushed it ahead, even assigning the review of comments pertaining to the Bill to a Joint Parliamentary Committee and not the usual Standing Parliamentary Committee (Science and Technology, Environment and Forests). Ultimately, the Bill became law in August 2023.

One of the many issues that experts had pointed out as controversial in the newly amended Act was that it would take away the protection afforded to forest lands such as deemed forests and community forests (that are not officially recorded as forests) and open them up to human activities under the garb of “national security” and “defence” purposes.

Following a petition filed by conservationists in the Supreme Court, the court gave an interim order on February 19, upholding one of the main clauses of the FCA: that the dictionary meaning of forests be upheld, and not altered as per the new amendment, until states provide all details of recorded forests. The case is still ongoing in the court.

Secondly, the notices issued by the NGT to the government asking for an explanation for the tree cover loss also include one to the director of the Survey of India. The Survey of India is India’s national mapping agency, and is a government institute under the Department of Science and Technology.

While the institute is best known for its topographical maps, its charter of duties as per the DST website also includes surveys of forests. However, India’s official forest surveys are conducted by the Forest Survey of India (FSI), an organisation directly under the union environment ministry.

Contradictions in ISFR and GFW data

The FSI’s latest survey of forest and tree cover (the India State of Forest Report or ISFR 2021) in India — released in January 2022 — claims that the country’s forest and tree cover has increased by 2,261 sq. km (around 2.26 lakh hectares) since the last assessment in 2019.

However, as per the GFW data quoted by the news reports, 18 per cent (4,14,000 hectares) of the total 2.33 million hectares of tree cover loss occurred in humid primary forests in the country.

Even when the ISFR 2021 report was released in January 2022, mappers and scientists flagged several issues with the report to The Wire Science. Most importantly, they called the report’s methods into question, and the possibility that it may be showing India to be more forested than it really is.

The ISFR 2021 did, however, record a decline in forest cover in the country’s hill and tribal districts as well as across the northeastern states — which matches the data provided by the GFW (of tree cover loss in northeast India) and quoted in the news reports.

But though these numbers paint contrasting images of forest and tree cover gain (as per the ISFR) and tree cover loss (per the GFW) one caveat in comparing these numbers is that the definitions of tree and forest cover, and tree cover alone, used by the ISFR and GFW respectively, are different. So are the methodologies used by both data sources.

Thirdly, NGT’s demands for an explanation on tree cover loss in India also comes at a time when science shows that there have been huge losses of trees outside protected areas as well. Over three years, more than five million large trees have ‘vanished’ from India’s farmlands, as per a recent study. Hotspots of such tree vanishings include parts of central India, particularly Maharashtra and Telangana.

At the same time, another recent study showed that India’s built-up area has increased over the past 17 years, from 2005-06 to 2022-23, reported Down to Earth. Built up area across the country has expanded by almost 2.5 million hectares: that’s around the same area of tree cover loss across the country that the Indian Express reported on.