India steadily adding to forest cover: Govt report

In the last 10 years, India’s net addition to its forest cover has broadly been 0.3 million hectares per year and the country’s total forest and tree cover is 78.37 million hectares which is 23.84 per cent of geographical area.

Maintaining the need to improve tree cover, which has the potential to be a major carbon sink, the ‘India State of Forest Report 2009’ showed that India’s forests neutralise more than 11 per cent of India’s greenhouse gas emissions. “Broadly, India’s net addition to the forest cover in the last 10 years is 0.3 million hectares per year. For Brazil and Indonesia, there has been a net loss of 2.5 million hectares in the same time period. Improving the quality of our forest cover is a centrepiece of our strategy to combat climate change, too,” said environment minister Jairam Ramesh while launching the report here today.

Broadly, about 34 per cent of the country's forests fall in the tropical moist deciduous category, 30 per cent in the tropical dry deciduous, 11 per cent in Himalayan temperate, nine per cent in the tropical wet evergreen category, 6 per cent in subtropical pine and about 5 per cent in the tropical thorn category, says the report.

Moreover, for the first time, India’s forests have been mapped into 16 forest type groups and forest and tree cover has been estimated with due consideration to altitudinal levels.