Planting trees is a good thing, but experts say that cutting old trees and planting new trees is not a good thing. India’s policies are being criticized on this basis. For scientist, activist and tree lover Ravi Chopra, this scene is heart-wrenching. Where once there used to be a dense forest near his house, now only flat yellow land is visible. There are heaps of gravel and other equipment needed to build the road and there is movement of laborers for the construction of the road.
“All this is driving us crazy,” says Chopra, who lives in the Himalayan city of Dehradun. We will have to pay a heavy price to cut down our forests. Ravi Chopra runs an organization that works for the protection of the environment.He is now saddened by the felling of trees to widen two roads in Dehradun.
Trees are being cut in full swing for roads, electricity and other projects across the country. According to government data, 83,000 hectares of forest has been cut between 2016 and 2021. Of these, five per cent were on protected land in national parks etc. The pressure of development in India is so much that the area of the country’s established forests is continuously shrinking. However, the government says that it is replenishing the forests by planting trees in other areas.
The Government of India has set a target of planting so many forests by 2030, through which 2.5 to 3 billion tonnes of carbon can be absorbed. The government wants to achieve its climate change goals through this. But critics say that planting trees in lieu of felled trees cannot compensate for the forests. Experts say that cutting down the forest and planting trees in return is a bad option to replenish the full forests, even if it reduces the level of carbon dioxide.
Recommendation to stop tree plantation scheme
The Supreme Court of India had constituted an expert committee of seven members which was tasked to study the alternative of planting trees in lieu of deforestation. That committee has urged the government to discontinue its plan to plant 1,000 trees per hectare.
That committee stated that intensive tree planting “may appear to be an attractive short-term plan, but in practice it leans towards the planting of quickly growing trees that are not native to the area. Such trees have very little capacity to sustain local biodiversity.
The committee’s report says that in some places this policy can be harmful to the ecosystem and also economically. The report concludes that instead of a uniform arrangement everywhere, there should be plantation according to the needs of the local ecosystem. The report cites the example of Gujarat where a tree brought in from outside occupied the local grasslands. These grasslands were part of the ecology as cattle grazing pastures and black buck habitat.
Jigmet Takpa, Joint Secretary, Ministry of Forest and Environment, India, says that due to the large population of India, it is natural to put pressure on resources like land and forests. He told the Thomson Reuters Foundation, “Whenever the government starts a project for the welfare of the people, it has become a fashion to criticize it in the name of the environment. But we respect what is said in the committee’s report. deserves to be known and implemented.”
In January last year itself, the Government of India had released a report on the state of forests, in which it was said that the forest area of the country has increased by 2,261 square kilometers, or about 4.5 lakh football fields, in the last two years. But experts consider this insufficient.
‘Pointless policy’
Kanchi Kohli, an expert on environmental policy at the Delhi-based Center for Policy Research, says that by focusing only on carbon emissions, the government is also running the risk of increasing the population of the same tree, which can threaten local ecology and traditional biodiversity. Is.
She explains, “The report, based on satellite data, has been prepared with a focus on domestic and international climate change goals. It does not include the loss of natural forests and their damage to local economies and biodiversity. Not mentioned.”
As far as reducing carbon emissions is concerned, not all experts are unanimous on the current policy. Forrest Fleishman, an expert on forest and governance policy at the University of Minnesota in the US, says that this policy makes no sense. He says, “When mature trees are cut, their ability to absorb carbon is immediately lost whereas new trees take many years to develop that capacity. And this also depends on the trees that are planted. They will actually grow, which, according to our research, doesn’t happen often. Research shows that new plantations can never replace mature forests in terms of carbon storage.”