📌 Deforestation On Ground, Afforestation On Paper!

South Asia is among the world’s most climate-vulnerable regions. Rising temperatures, erratic rainfall, droughts and extreme weather are already threatening water, agriculture and food security. The World Bank warns that climate change could sharply reduce living conditions for hundreds of millions of South Asians.

In such a situation, expanding and protecting green cover should be a national climate priority. Yet the CAG’s latest audit of the Green India Mission tells a disturbing story. Against a target of 1.4 million hectares of additional forest cover, only about 0.03 million hectares was achieved between 2015–16 and 2024–25. Resulting into a shortfall of approx. 98% (https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/green-india-mission-fell-short-by-98-in-increasing-forest-cover-cag-11912065). This should ideally be read a 100% only you know.

The Hasdeo-Arand landscape in Chhattisgarh is a particularly stark example. In June 2026, the environment ministry granted in-principle forest clearance for diversion of 1,742.6 hectares for the Kente Extension coal block, followed by environmental clearance later that month. The proposed Great Nicobar Island infrastructure project involves an integrated transshipment terminal, airport, township and associated development across a large area. Government documents record an in-principle approval for diversion of 130.75 sq km of forest land.

Moreover, between April 2023 and March 2026, 71,023 hectares of forest land was approved for diversion to non-forest purposes across the country. The reality it seems is that we are failing to create forests while continuing to sacrifice existing ones. Planting saplings cannot compensate for destroying mature, biodiverse natural forests. Climate policy must begin with protecting the forests we already have.

📌 Climate Impact on Forests!

The rich, natural forests of India were brought under “modern, scientific” forestry by the British in 1864. And with that the Indian tradition of seeing the forest as a community resource to be conserved and used sustainably was jettisoned. In its place came the commercial exploitation of the forest by the colonial rulers. Natural mixed forests used freely by locals for their personal needs and for incomes were replaced by commercial monocultures like teak, pine, and sal which were owned by the British.

Colonial exploitation of the forest was reversed when the Forest Rights Act, 2006 was enacted. This Act recognized that Adivasi and tribal communities as well as other traditional forest dwellers have the legal right to own, collect, use and sell minor forest produce, collectively known as Non-Timber Forest Products (NTFPs) NTFPs include tendu leaves used for rolling bidis, mahua flowers and seeds, wild fruits and nuts, honey, tamarind, medicinal plants, herbs, bamboo and a variety of edible and useful forest products. For Adivasi and other forest-dwelling communities, these products have traditionally been part of their food, livelihoods and everyday lives.

But climate change is beginning to interfere with the seasonal and ecological processes on which these resources depend. A change in rainfall is affecting flowering so availability of Mahua flowers gets affected. Rising temperatures affect fruiting and seed production. Drought can reduce the availability of edible plants and wild fruits. Changes in temperature and moisture also affect major NTFPs such as honey and lac which are significant income sources for the tribal communities and forest dwellers.

These changes are already being felt .The forest may still be standing. Its canopy may even appear unchanged. But if the flowers do not bloom as before, if fruits become scarce, or if seasonal forest produce becomes unreliable, then the forest is no longer the livelihood supporting resource it used to be.

📍Destroying Uttarakhand

Many years ago when I went to school in Nainital, it was a place of thrilling natural beauty. Uttarakhand then a part of Uttar Pradesh, (UP) was lush and green wherever you looked. Every place seemed like a picnic spot.

In 2000, the new state of Uttarakhand was created, hiving off the hilly areas of UP and some parts of the terai. Then “development” began in right ernest , turning this haven into a concrete jungle. A study conducted by the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) using satellite imagery, climate data, and GIS analysis shows that snow cover decreased by over 1640 sq km from 1992 to 2022. In the same period concrete construction increased 13 times from 40.66 sq km in 1992 to 526.35 sq km in 2022.

Uttarakhand is being slowly buried under concrete. Gone is the haven with lush green forests full of wonderful plants, birds and animals. In its place is emerging an ugly built up blot on the Himalayas. Not only is the state turning ugly, it is also turning dangerous. Roads are being cut into hillsides without any planning, opening them up to landslides which have increased several fold. Forests are being slaughtered, driving wild life away and altering the ecosystem for the worse. Forests regulated water flow, when they are cut flooding increases. 

The perverse tragedy is that the development that is needed, is not reaching the villages where good schools, health care, basic services and livelihood opportunities are desperately required. All the development is devoted to urban areas converting them into monstrous concrete jungles. You just have to visit the famed hill stations of yesterday - Nainital, Dehradun and Mussoorie to see what hideous urban sprawls they have become. 

This kind of “development” that our so called ‘vikas’ oriented government boasts about, is actually raising vulnerability, for people in the mountains, as well as for people living downstream. The Himalayas are a living, fragile ecosystem with tenuous limits. It is extremely foolish and highly dangerous to think you can continue treating mountains like construction sites. Nature will have the final say and the consequences will be extremely unpleasant, as we have already begun to see with increasing incidences of manmade calamities.

 📍India’s appalling rank on environmental health

Environmental scientists and researchers at Yale University and Columbia University bring out a major biennial report on the environmental health and environmental performance of countries. The 2026 report shows that India has been performing extraordinarily poorly on this matrix, ranking last (180th out of 180 countries studied) in 2022. It showed a sliver of improvement in 2024, ending up, still at the bottom at 176th out of 180. In 2026, it continued to remain at the bottom most step, 176th out of 177.

By any standard, that is an abysmal record. The report highlights an acute “development-versus-pollution” tension. India has tried to provide energy access to millions of people, relying heavily on coal with its attendant problems of deadly emissions leading to severe air pollution and shooting greenhouse gases. Other factors that were mentioned were poor biodiversity protection (small wonder given the scale at which we are destroying forests), and a sharp decline in looking after marine protected areas, as the primary reasons for the low ranking.  

It is embarrassing that instead of being self critical and trying to understand why our performance is so poor and how to fix it, the Indian Ministry of Environment has argued that the Yale-Columbia report is derived using “unscientific methods”. Really? Yale and Columbia with their record of top quality work on environmental issues out of world class labs, don’t know what they are talking about? And the pitiful occupants of our Environment Ministry have the academic excellence to challenge the work of some of the best universities in the world? A little humility and some introspection would be in order here.

The report: https://epi.yale.edu/region/2026/southern-asia 

 

📍Genetic Diversity is Important in Forests!

Anyone who has taken the train to Nainital or anywhere in the Kumaon Uttarakhand, will have alighted at the last train station of the route- Kathgodam. Look at that name carefully-Kath means wood in Hindi and Godam means godown. Kathgodam was named for the place where all the trees that were felled in the Kumaon region were stored for further transportation to wherever they were needed. Kathgodam in a manner of speaking, was the graveyard of the forests of the Kumaon region.

During the time of British rule, forests were seen only as a resource to be exploited, not anything of intrinsic value, as pools of diverse plants, animals, birds, insects, a whole range of biodiversity. They did not see forests as agents that modulate the local climate and least of all, that they were the homes of several indigenous communities. So the Brits engaged in large scale felling of natural forests for their commercial and industrial use, especially in the Himalayas and the Western Ghats, reducing rich forests to raw material. They planted monocultures largely of timber trees like Teak and Sal, as well as Pine for resin and fast growing Eucalyptus and Acacia for firewood. Colonial rule destroyed our biodiversity rich forests, altered native ecosystems and displaced indigenous

communities who relied on them for food, fodder, fuel and timber. 

Unfortunately, our own Forest Department took over the colonial legacy and continued to treat the forest largely as raw material, planting trees primarily for commercial use, so we have grown used to seeing uniform plantations as forests. All this is changing slowly but we need to emphasize over and over again that the forests are valuable for many reasons- modulating the climate, storing water, maintaining biodiversity as also their value to the lives of forest dwelling communities.

For forests to be forests, the varied genetic diversity they contain, must be protected and enabled to flourish. The genetic diversity in forests is key to their integrity, resilience and long-term ecosystem health. It is what provides the basis for tree populations to adapt to changing climates, resist invasive pests and survive environmental stressors like dry spells and excessive humidity.

Genetically uniform tree populations like in man-made plantations are highly vulnerable to pests and diseases. In contrast, genetically diverse populations contain many individuals with natural resistance, thus ensuring that the entire stand is not killed by a single pathogen as happened with genetically uniform potato farms in Ireland. The entire potato crop, the staple food of the Irish, got wiped out due to infestation by a fungus called Phytophthera infestans, This resulted in a famine in which about one million people died of starvation. Genetic diversity helps forests to adapt to climate turbulence because forests very often have to face rapid environmental shifts, like rising temperatures and prolonged droughts. A mixture of genetic profiles increases the likelihood that certain trees/plants will tolerate heatwaves and others will be able to cope with low water availability. This enables an overall survival of the forest even if it suffers some damage. 

From the aspect of commercial use, forestry programs are better off with greater genetic variability so that they can select trees to breed for desirable timber traits—such as faster growth rates, higher wood density, and straight trunks—without diminishing the overall stress resilience of the forest. Healthy genetic diversity with a variety of species is also essential to maintain the integrity of the forest and restore it if damage is inflicted. Reforestation programs have a higher chance of success if they have access to seeds from a diverse range of thriving, well adapted trees because these have high survival rates.

📍Who is saving and who is destroying the forest ?

A recent report has just told us that India can save its forests by winning the war on poverty. Indicating thereby that the poor exploit the forest recklessly to fulfil their needs. But is this really true? How come there are dense jungles where the Adivasi communities, hardly ranked as the “richest” on the economic scale, have been living for generations? And how is it that forests or even orchards near cities are hacked and cleared for projects like luxury housing or amusement parks?
 
Forest dwellers usually secure their livelihoods in sustainable ways and they treat their forests as their strongest allies, not their enemies. The concept of Sacred Groves in the North East shows us how these communities venerate their forests and trees. The Sarna of the Chotanagpur adivasis are groves of old Sal trees which are sacred to them, where they believe their village deities and spirits reside. Sacred Groves and Sarnas are inviolate. The forests are protected.
 
On the other hand, the township of Gurgaon (now Gurugram), part of the National Capital Region has been built on orchards, fields and pastures. No, it is not the poor who ravage the forests, it is the rich with their bottomless greed.
 
We are seeing how the lush, biodiversity rich Hasdeo forest is being butchered, heartless brutes treading over the weeping women holding on to the feet of the monsters who are vandalising their trees, their deities and gods, the spirits of their ancestors. The communities of Hasdeo are not destroying their forest, Adani and his henchmen are doing that.
 
So please stop the hypocrisy about winning the war on poverty to save forests. Stop spinning yarns about income generation activities that will be mired in corruption and never materialise. Instead, restrain the unbridled avarice of the super-rich honchos…and the forests will be saved.

The News - https://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/science/not-binary-india-can-save-its-forests-by-winning-the-war-on-poverty/article71100846.ece

 📌 WORLD ENVIRONMENT DAY 2026: WHAT EXACTLY ARE WE CELEBRATING?

Today is WorldEnvironmentDay. A day for speeches, hashtags, photo-ops with saplings, solemn pledges and carefully crafted messages about our love for nature.

But forgive me for asking - what exactly are we celebrating?

The environment that we are systematically destroying? The forests we are cutting down for mining? The rivers we are poisoning with industrial waste and sewage? The mountains we are blasting in the name of infrastructure development? The biodiversity we are driving to extinction? Or the tribal communities we are uprooting from lands they have protected for

generations?

Nothing captures the hypocrisy of this annual ritual better than what is happening in the Hasdeo Forests of Chhattisgarh, one of India’s richest forest ecosystems, often called the 'Lungs of Central India'.

I’m not against generating energy or against development, but the question is why the easiest solution always seems to be sacrificing forests, biodiversity and indigenous rights.

Year after year, governments assure us that environmental protection is a priority. Prime Ministers and assorted others speak passionately about climate change, sustainability and green growth. Yet on the ground, forests continue to disappear under excavators and mining clearances.

World Environment Day has increasingly become an exercise in collective self-congratulation and is reduced to mere tokenism that allows governments, corporations and even citizens to feel virtuous for a day while the destruction continues uninterrupted for the remaining 364.

For decades, the scientists, environmentalists, and everyone concerned have been warning that the climate crisis is no longer a future threat. It has already entered our homes: the heatwaves, floods, droughts, crop failures and disappearing water sources are real-life

manifestations.

I am pained to say that while leaders plant ceremonial saplings and deliver speeches on sustainability, an estimated 5 lac trees are proposed to be slaughtered in Hasdeo forests; over 15000 Adivasi families will be impacted, whose lives depend on these forests for their livelihoods, for their very survival. Let that sink in. If this is environmental protection, what does environmental destruction look like?

Senior officials of the Himachal forest department have announced that they plan to develop 136 sites in the forest area for ecotourism. The main objective, they say, is to decongest overcrowded city tourist destinations and bring the tourists closer to nature.

This ecotourism project will offer activities like trekking, camping, rock climbing, and motor biking as well as food vans offering local cuisine. At the same time, this project also aims to create income opportunities for rural youth with jobs like travel guides and cooks and other sundry ad hoc occupations.

I would ask the Himachal Forest Department to see the consequences of inviting unbridled tourism. In this case, religious tourism, in the neighbouring state of Uttarakhand, has led to thirty km long traffic jams going up to the holy site of Kedarnath, so-called 'pilgrims' tanking up on alcohol in the holy town, and lots of incidents of unruly behaviour.

Or take a look at the recently minted Dham at Kainchi in Almora. Choked traffic along all mountain roads, causing endless misery to local residents, drunk policemen misbehaving with local women, discarded food and plastic litter strewn along kilometres of roads going up to Kainchi and down again.

Is this the tourism you had in mind? You want to earn revenue and wreck your state? Your call.

The vandals going up as tourists will be the same.

https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/himachal/to-promote-ecotourism-himachal-forest-dept-to-lease-out-51-of-136-identified-sites-soon/amp/?utm=relatedarticles

 📍Animals have no seat at the table so we must speak for them.

This news in Hindustan Hindi underscores the point that climate change is not only affecting us humans but animals too. We can switch on the AC when it gets too hot, we migrate to cooler hill stations in summer, we build climate-controlled homes. But what do these poor animals do? They don’t switch on ACs, they move like us, to cooler climes

 

The newspaper reports something deeply troubling. The rare Himalayan Bejal, (honey badger) a small carnivorous mammal that normally lives between 1500 and 2000 meters, has been spotted for the first time at 3500 meters. Tigers have been camera-trapped at 3000 meters in the Sunderdhunga Glacier Valley in Bageshwar — a place where summer temperatures barely cross 12 degrees. Elephants have been seen climbing into the mountains around Ramnagar. These are not random wanderings. These are desperate survival responses to a warming world.

This pattern is not unique to the Himalayas It is unfolding across the planet.

⇢ The American Pika is vanishing from its lower-altitude habitats entirely in the American Rockies due to rising temperatures.

⇢  Polar bears are facing a similar fate as their sea ice habitat melts earlier and forms later every year.

⇢  In the European Alps, plant species are moving upslope at a rate of about 30 meters per decade, and animals are following.

⇢  Mountain gorillas in the Virunga range are being pushed to higher altitudes as temperatures rise in the forests below.

⇢  The mountain pygmy possum in Australia is facing habitat collapse as snowfall in the Australian Alps becomes increasingly unreliable.

⇢  Coral reef fish in the Indo-Pacific are moving poleward, tracking cooler waters, while the coral itself is bleaching and dying in place.

What we are witnessing that every species is reacting to a crisis it did not create. We are responsible for this warming; the consequences are faced by them.

There is another dimension to this that I have written about before and return to here. When animals move, they abandon the ecosystems they were part of. The predator-prey relationships, the pollination networks, the seed dispersal systems — all of these are disrupted. An elephant in the mountains is not just an elephant in the wrong place. It is a missing piece in the lowland forest it has vacated.

We owe it to these creatures, and to ourselves, to treat climate change not as an economic or political negotiation, but as a moral obligation. The animals have no seat at the table. We must speak for them.

THE BORLAUG DILEMMA

By FRED PEARCE

Will agricultural intensification save our natural ecosystems from farmer invasion?

He is the most revered figure in agricultural research – the father of the green revolution.  But the late Norman Borlaug’s influence extends further even than delivering the seeds that have fed the world.  He also established in agricultural and environmental orthodoxy what is known today as the Borlaug hypothesis — the idea that intensifying agriculture is also the key to saving forests and other natural ecosystems from invasion by farmers.

The idea underpins research priorities in agriculture, for which increased yield is to holy grail.  More surprisingly perhaps, it sustains conservationists who want to abandon green notions of low-intensity organic agriculture in favour of giving agriculture its head.

Now the argument is being deployed in the debate over a future global climate change deal.  Some advocates of REDD, which would provide finance for protecting forests as carbon stores, say carbon offsetters should be encouraged to fund intensified farming too.  It is one facet of the push for “climate-smart” agriculture that we will heard again at the next climate talks in Doha later this year.

Lord Nicholas Stern, the British economist behind the highly influential Stern Review on the economics of climate change, puts the Borlaug hypothesis this way: “Cattle pasture in Brazil has only one animal per hectare.  Raise that to two animals and you can save the Amazon rainforest.”

But is it true?  If farming were a zero-sum game, with a simple aim of growing enough food to feed the world, then clearly intensification should spare land for nature.  But market forces may have perverse effects.

The Contrarian View

The counter-argument is that farmers don’t clear forests to feed the world; they clear forests to make money.  So helping farmers become more efficient and productive won’t reduce the threat.  It will increase it, by encouraging them to expand, and increasing their resources to do it.

As Tony Simons, deputy director of the World Agroforestry Centre in Nairobi, put it to me a year or so back: “Borlaug thought that if you addressed poverty in the forest border, they’d stop taking their machetes into the forest.  Actually, they get enough money to buy a chainsaw and do much more damage.”

Recent studies give weight to this contrarian view.  Thomas Rudel of Rutgers University, New Jersey, compared national trends in agricultural yields and how much land is under crops.  If Borlaug was right, then countries with fast-rising yields should see less increase in croplands, perhaps even a decrease.  Sadly, he found no such link.

Robert Ewers of the Zoological Society of London reported that increased yields of staple food crops do not spare the land, but stimulated increased planting of other crops, including non-food crops like cotton, rubber and biofuels.  As a result, he concluded, “land sparing is a weak process that only occurs under a limited set of circumstances.”

Economists are not surprised

That’s how markets work, they say.  Arild Angelsen, of the Norwegian University of Life Sciences and senior associate at CIFOR, modelled the competing influences and concluded that, contrary to the Borlaug hypothesis, “local yield increases tend to stimulate agricultural encroachment”.

Globalization increases the stimulus.  After all, Brazil’s assault on the Amazon in the late 20th century was driven not by an imperative to feed its own population, but by its successful drive to become the world’s biggest agricultural exporter.  Similarly only a fraction of the palm oil grown on Indonesia’s former forests is for domestic use.

Rudel has suggested that the Borlaug hypothesis is confounded by a modern version of the Jevons paradox.  The 19th century British economist William Jevons pointed out that during the industrial revolution, increased efficiency in coal burning led to more coal being burned, rather than less. Similarly today, more intensive agriculture may stimulate rather than defuse the clearance of land for new farms.

Can the Borlaug hypothesis help tackle climate change?

There are other reasons to question Stern’s suggestion that the Borlaug hypothesis could help tackle climate change.  Even if agriculture did spare forests, it also massively increases farming’s carbon footprint.  Might those emissions swamp any gains from protecting forests?

A study by Jennifer Burney and others at Stanford in 2010 suggested not.  After balancing both influences, she estimated a net benefit to the atmosphere from agricultural intensification of 590 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide in the past 50 years.

But surely that depends on the timescale you use.  A mature forest is can only sequester so much carbon, while agricultural emissions continue for as long as the land is cultivated.  Run the clock forward and the balance may be reversed.

None of this is to say that intensification won’t be needed.  The world has to be fed, after all. But the simple belief that deploying agribusiness to drive up farm yields will deliver forest protection seems economically illiterate.  And the even simpler notion that investment in the intensification of agriculture can have a direct carbon payback seems dangerous folly.

About the Author:

Fred Pearce is a journalist and author based in London, UK.  He writes regularly for New Scientist magazine, the Guardian newspaper and Yale e360 web site.  His books include Peoplequake, When the Rivers Run Dry and, mostly recently, The Land Grabbers.