Rapid Deforestation & Making of a City Forest

WE ARE ALL aware of the ill effects of deforestation and yet millions of trees are destroyed for the sake of development – agriculture for food security, highways atreesnd roads, construction of factories, commercial spaces and residential complexes etc.

- Krishan Kalra

The World Health Organization (WHO) has estimated that in the last 30 years 420 million hectares of forest have been lost for feeding and accommodating the 11 billion estimated population of the world. Humanity has destroyed one third of the world’s forests by expanding agriculture.

Large parts of the world that were once covered by forests and wildlands are now used for agriculture. Half of the ‘habitable land’ (after leaving out the ice and deserts) is used for agriculture, which also uses 70 per cent of global fresh water. Having said that, let me hasten to add that ‘agricultural land (sum of cropland and grazing pastures) per capita’ has come down drastically since 1961, due to improved yield. The world average at 1.5 hectare in 1961 was around 0.75 hectare in 2018! In India this has come down from 0.4 hectare to 0.1 hectare during the same period. Fortunately, global deforestation peaked in the 1980s. In India too around 400,000 hectares has been the net addition to our forest cover between 1961 and 2018 after taking into account the nearly one million hectare annual deforestation. (source: UN FAO thru ttps://ourworldindata.org)

Whereas forest cover in the world is about 30 per cent, sadly, in India, it is only 22 per cent. In a recent international study, it was disclosed that India has only 28 trees per capita against nearly 8,400 in Canada, 4,000 in Russia, 3,000 in Sweden, 1,400 in Brazil, 700 in the USA and 100 in China. We can take sadistic pleasure in seeing just one per capita in Turkmenistan and five per capita in Pakistan. Isn’t that a matter of great shame?