World to lose India-sized tropical forest cover if no steps taken, says new report

Even as international leaders battle over the responsibility to tackle climate change, a recently-released report suggests that the earth’s tropical forest cover is being depleted at an alarming rate. The report, released by the Centre for Global Development, says that if steps are not taken to curb deforestation, an area of tropical forest as large as the size of India will be lost by 2050. According to an article in the Washington Post, the researchers came to this conclusion by using published satellite data on global forest cover from 2001 to 2012. [caption id=“attachment_2406974” align=“alignleft” width=“380” class=" “]  Amazon forest. AFP[/caption] According to the report, with compensatory measures similar to the ones in the present day, deforestation will increase steadily for the next several decades and slightly accelerate in the 2040s. The Washington Post notes that the implications of this would be felt not just on flora and fauna, but also on climate change. There is only a limited amount of carbon-dioxide which can go into the atmosphere if the earth’s average temperature is prevented from increasing by more than 2 degrees Celsius, the article points out. In India, environment minister Prakash Javadekar had triggered a controversy recently after he reportedly asked ministry officials to replace the word “diversion” with “afforestation” in all official communications. A report by The Indian Express had then said that this may have been because of Javadekar being wary of the perception that the ministry was clearing projects too fast. The minister was then quoted as saying that a condition for clearance of projects is that compensatory afforestation needs to be done, and that the use of the term was about thinking positive. However, the CAG in 2013 had criticised the government for its “dismal” record in increasing the country’s green cover through compensatory afforestation. According to its report, between 2006 and 2012, the amount of forest land diverted for non-forest use was 114,877 hectares. Against this, 103,382 hectares for to be provided as compensatory afforestation, but project promoters only provided 28,086 hectares, as reported by the Times of India.