India among the top greeners in the world. Is that good news?
There is good news on the green front. And India and China can take a bow to that.
According to the recent finding by NASA, the planet is greener than it was 20 years ago. The main cause for this is being attributed to the ambitious tree planting programs implemented in the two most populous countries, and the scaling up of their implementation and technology around agriculture.
This means that there is five per cent more greenery every year compared to the 2000s.
NASA used Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) to get a detailed picture of Earth's global vegetation through time. The technique provided up to 500-meter resolution for the past two decades. The report was published in the journal Nature Sustainability.
The report places China on top when it comes to “greening due to human activity” index. China is followed by India, then the European Union, Canada and Russia. The USA ranks at number 7, following Australia.
The report comes in direct contrast to the stereotypical perception of China and India's willingness to overexploit land, water and resources for economic gain. In fact, India continues to break world records in tree planting — with Indians planting 50 million trees in just 24 hours.
However, before we gloat too soon, it is important for us to assess the quality of greening — and the impact of this greening on the in mitigating the environmental detriments — the quality of air, land, water and other resources. The report goes to establish that while the greening in China is from forests (42 per cent) and croplands (32 per cent), in India, it is mostly from croplands (82 per cent) with a minor contribution from forests (4.4 per cent).
According to lead researcher, Dr Chi Chen of Boston University, “India and China account for one-third of the greening, but contain only nine per cent of the planet’s land area covered in vegetation.”
The greening owing to extensive and unsustainable agriculture actually takes a toll on resources. The land is subjected to extensive degradation including changing soil’s acidity, alkalinity, salinity, the decline in soil structure quality, loss of fertility, waterlogging, compaction, and pesticide contamination. Irrigation leads to depletion of underground aquifers through over-drafting, and the synthetic pesticides used in farming are among the most widespread method of controlling pests in agriculture — they can leach through the soil and enter the groundwater, as well as linger in food products and result in human and wildlife deaths.
Furthermore, afforesting the landscapes is not sufficient to offset deforestation — the trees planted without proper analysis and planning could well end up doing more damage than good. Forests should be left to flourish on their own, and alien plants should not be planted inside.
For instance, the pine forests in the Himalayan region are considered to be the most potent and the most devastating agents for the depletion of natural water resources. “A pine tree sheds copious amounts of pine needles (pirul), which due to its toxicity is neither consumed by animals nor decomposed by microbes to convert it into humus and soil. Every year, the annual production of pine needles is overlain by the next year’s leaf fall. Thus, the pine needles keep accumulating year after year in the absence of a natural decaying process. The pine needle cover functions like an impermeable plastic sheet, which accelerates the rainfall-runoff all over the area,” say researchers Lok Vigyan Kendra, Almora.
According to the paper, how the greening trend may change in the future depends on numerous factors. With the increased food production in India being facilitated by groundwater irrigation, the trend is subject to change if the groundwater is depleted. The researchers also pointed out that the gain in greenness around the world does not necessarily offset the loss of natural vegetation in tropical regions such as Brazil and Indonesia.
There are consequences for sustainability and biodiversity in those ecosystems beyond the simple greenness of the landscape.