India will have zero forest value as in 25 years.
By Rakesh Agrawal
Forests are the giant earth’s lungs that soak carbon dioxide and emit oxygen during the day. Little wonder, they are called earth’s carbon sinks, depositing billion of tons of carbon into them that we, the humans have created, thanks to the paradigm of development that we followed.
So, a worldwide movement is on to arrest deforestation and plant new ones. Here, the little, Scandinavian country, Norway has taken the lead when it became the first country to prohibit deforestation when the Norwegian government announced this decision on May 26.
The country also decided to stop the use and buy forest-based products as the government acted on the recommendation of Action Plan on Nature Diversity by the country’s Standing Committee on Energy and Environment and the Norwegian environmentalists have won the day, united under the umbrella of the Rainforest Foundation Norway (RFN), which lobbied this move for years.
Fill with enthusiasm, Nils Hermann Ranum, head, RFN, now calls other countries, particularly Germany and the UK, to follow the suit.
So far, so good. But, the real impacts on arresting deforestation would only be then when tropical rainforests are saves as a study has shown that from 2000 to 2011, about 40 percent of total tropical deforestation was due to wood, palm oil, soy and beef products from seven countries — Malaysia, Paraguay, Bolivia, Argentina, Brazil, Indonesia and Papua New Guinea — alone that are also major sources of carbon emissions at 44 percent.
Norway also support for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) in Tanzania and Brazil has reached a high $214 million and the country has earlier committed $250 million to the preservation of Guyana’s forests. The Norwegian government is also paying $150 million to Liberia to prohibit deforestation.
Here, India and China, two major sources of carbon dioxide emission, must take corrective measure since today, India has the world’s poorest per capita forestland. The per capita forest Land in India is just O.1 ha; while the world average is one hectare, Canada 14.2 hectare, Australia 7.6 ha and USA 7.30 ha. Indian forests comprise only 0.50 percent of the world forest area and India is losing about 1.5 million hectares of forest cover each year.
If this trend continues we may in the next 20 years or so, India will have zero forest value as in 25 years (1951-1976) India has lost 4.1 million hectares of forest area.
Maybe, because of this, India is planning to spend about $6.2 billion to create more forests.
But, allotting money is one thing, growing the right kind of forests that are useful for forest-dependent people and sustaining them is another as according to the World Wide Fund for Nature, 1.6 billion people worldwide currently depend on forests for their livelihood & about 600 million such people are from India. http://www.techtimes.com/articles/156494/20160506/india-to-spend-6-billion-to-create-new-forests.htm#sthash.qUMV5loW.dpuf
China has taken a significant lead in this direction as forests are returning in China, according to a new study by the Michigan State University Google Earth images and NASA data recorded revealed significant gains in tree coverage over 61,000 square miles or 1.6 percent of the wooded areas of China between the years 2000 and 2010.
As decades of logging left most once forest covered areas of China stripped barren, the government is starting a massive program of reforestation. That effort is now being hailed, by some environmentalists, as a success worthy of emulation by other countries.
This may not be such a good news for other countries like Vietnam, Indonesia, and Madagascar that is currently chopping down vast portions of their forests to sell wood products to Chinese markets and this move will further put pressure on their forests and Chinese manufacturers will not be able to sell the wood products to the consumers of other countries, they will turn to these Southeast Asian countries. See more
In order to save the earth, the only one that we got, from assured destruction, we must keep it green and this greenery cannot be at the expense of one country to the other.