Jan 13,2022:India’s forest is doing better than the last assessment. The Ministry of Environment, Forest, and Climate Change has released the India State of Forest Report 2021 (ISFR). According to the report, in 2021, the total forest and tree cover in India is 80.9 million hectares, which is 24.62% of the geographical area of the country.
The Report, prepared by the Forest Survey of India (FSI) presented findings of its mapping and forest resource assessment activities at the national level. The report not only provides information on forest, tree cover, and growing stock of the country but has valuable information on bamboo resources, forest fire, carbon stock, etc.
While releasing the report, Union Environment and Forest Minister Bhupender Yadav said that the focus is not to just conserve the forest quantitatively but to also qualitatively enrich it.
Difference between forest and tree cover
Tree cover is defined as all tree patches of size less than 1 hectare occurring outside the recorded forest area. It includes trees in all formations including scattered trees. On the other hand, Forest cover includes all areas more than 1 hectare in extent and have tree canopy density of 10% and above irrespective of land use and legal status.
While forest cover is estimated by a wall-to-wall mapping of the country using satellite data, tree cover is estimated partly using high-resolution data and partly from field inventory data of trees outside the forest.
The major takeaways from the Report:
i) In 2021, the total forest and tree cover in India is 80.9 million hectares, which is 24.62% of the geographical area of the country. It was 24.56% of the total geographical area as per the 2019 report.
ii) There is an increase of 2,261 sq km in the total forest and tree cover of India. Out of this, the increase in the forest cover has been observed as 1,540 sq km, and that in tree cover is 721 sq km.
iii) Under the current assessment, the total carbon stock in the country’s forest is estimated to be 7,204 million tonnes. There has been an increase of 79.4 million tonnes in the carbon stock of the country as compared to the last assessment of 2019.
Carbon stock means to the amount of carbon stored in forests in the form of biomass, soil, deadwood, and litter. More the carbon stock, the higher would be the forest’s capacity to absorb and take in carbon dioxide (CO2), a major greenhouse gas. An increase in green cover and carbon stock both indicates a healthy trend and shows India’s better preparedness to deal with greenhouse gas.
iv) The total mangrove cover in the country is 4,992 sq km. An increase of 17 sq Km in mangrove cover has been observed as compared to the previous assessment of 2019. Odisha (8 sq km) followed by Maharashtra (4 sq km) and Karnataka (3 sq km) are the top three states that have shown an increase in mangrove cover.
v) Area-wise Madhya Pradesh has the largest forest cover in the country followed by Arunachal Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Odisha, and Maharashtra.
vi) In terms of forest cover as a percentage of total geographical area, the top five States are Mizoram (84.53%), Arunachal Pradesh (79.33%), Meghalaya (76.00%), Manipur (74.34%), and Nagaland (73.90%).
vii) The present assessment also reveals that 17 states/UT’s have above 33% of the geographical area under forest cover.
