A staggering 3,660 sq.km. of evergreen and deciduous forests have disappeared over the past four decades, while 267 sq.km of built-up area and buildings have come up in and around protected areas in the State. This is about five times the size of Bengaluru.
A look into the data furnished by the office of the Comptroller and Account General (CAG), which recently audited the state of forests and the performance of the Forest Department, has thrown up startling figures on the decline and increasing degradation of protected forests.
With no official data available, the CAG entrusted a study to the Centre for Ecological Sciences, Indian Institute of Science, to tabulate the changes in Land Use Land Cover in forests using satellite imagery. The study focussed on areas in and around 13 protected areas – covering forests from Cauvery Wildlife Sanctuary to Kali Tiger Reserve – and used images from 1973, 1991-92 and 2016 to compare the changes in the forests and in the buffer zones upto nearly 10-km around these areas.
The report points to the degradation of evergreen, semi-evergreen and deciduous forests – which once made up nearly two-thirds of the forest type – as seen in their reducing areas. While evergreen forests declined by 1,893 sq.km, deciduous forests declined by 1,766.26 sq.km. One of the worst affected areas is the Kali Tiger Reserve where nearly 1,000 sq.km. of evergreen forests has reduced, the report shows.
“These changes can be directly attributed to anthropogenic activities in areas substantiated by an increase in cumulative area under agriculture and horticulture,” states the CAG in their report.
In various forms, agriculture and horticultural activities increased in over 235.5 sq.km. The CAG notes that the thinning of forests owing to human activity saw an increase in open areas in and around forests by more than 307 sq.km while built-up area tripled to nearly 412 sq.km.
“There is a lot of pressure on forests, especially from activities such as building roads and dams and conversion of woods into plantations... With degraded forests, herbivores do not find enough grazing land and tend to enter neighbouring farmlands. There is a link to human-animal conflict,” said G. Ravikanth, Fellow, Ashoka Trust for Research in Environment and the Ecology (ATREE).
‘Difficult to control’
Anur Reddy, Principal Chief Conservator of Forests (Wildlife), said the department had little control over the lands around forests. “These lands are private or belong to the Revenue Department. We have no control over their usage, particularly when there is an increase in coffee or areca plantations,” he said.
While the landscape within protected area boundaries are better protected, Mr. Reddy said there was still the danger of the invasive species, lantana, degrading land. The CAG notes that nearly 50% of protected areas had seen intensive lantana invasion and there has been little effort to contain the spread.
Mr. Ravikanth, who is currently researching the spread of lantana in BRT hills where an estimated 60% of the landscape has seen the invasive weed, said lantana was observed to modify both deciduous and evergreen landscapes. “Seeds of native species germinate well under lantana for the first six months, but after that, the weed chokes their growth,” he said.
Forest Department officials said they were looking to use the rural employment guarantee scheme to remove lantana from forest areas.
Resorts mushrooming
Resorts and homestays are mushrooming and tourist inflow into forests are increasing, but there is little understanding of the carrying capacity of the protected reserves, notes the Comptroller and Account General (CAG) in their report.
The report states that of the 51 commercial resorts operating within 10 km from forest areas in six sampled protected areas, just seven had been approved by the Forest Department. Of these resorts, seven were found to be inside enclosures or within forest limits – which is a violation of the wilderness tourism policy. Similarly, out of 50 operating homestays, 15 did not have the required permission.
The result was an increase in “unregulated tourist” inflow into forests. While ‘more popular’ reserves such as Bandipur, Nagarahole and BRT had assessed carrying capacity, at least seven other protected areas had not assessed the maximum of tourists it can sustain – despite significant increased in footfalls.
Surprisingly, the CAG report also notes that government vehicles used for safaris were all diesel-run and generated more noise than what was permitted.
