India lost 5 million farmland trees in five years: Research

CHENNAI: Widely considered to be one of the solutions for climate change and sequestering carbon from the atmosphere, green cover provided by the farmland trees (agroforestry) has witnessed a severe decline in India during the period 2018 to 2022, revealed a study.

Researchers from Denmark who conducted the study mapped 600 million farmland trees, excluding block plantations, and tracked them over the past decade. They found that around 11 per cent (± 2%) of the large trees (about 96 sqm of crown size) mapped in 2010-2011 had disappeared by 2018.

During the 2018–22 period, more than 5 million large farmland trees (the ones that have a crown size of about 67 metre square) have vanished, partly due to altered cultivation practices, wherein trees within fields are perceived as detrimental to crop yields.

"These observations are particularly unsettling given the current emphasis on agroforestry as a pivotal natural climate solution, playing a crucial role in both climate change adaptation and mitigation strategies, in addition to being important for supporting agricultural livelihoods and improving biodiversity," said the study report published in the prestigious journal, Nature.

Pointing out that there is little evidence supporting climatic changes as the direct and main reason for the observed losses, it said, "We thus conducted qualitative interviews with villagers from Telangana, Haryana, Kerala, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Kashmir and Jammu, all affected by the disappearance of trees in our maps.

All participants in the interviews verified the considerable reduction in the populations of mature trees within and along fields. These trees were removed owing predominantly to alterations in the cultivation practices."

The report pointed out that the establishment of new boreholes, which resulted in an augmented water supply, facilitated the expansion of paddy fields with the objective of boosting crop yields is the main reason for removing the farmland trees. The decision to remove trees within fields is often driven by the perception that their benefits are relatively low and concerns that their shading effect, in particular for trees with a very large crown such as neem, may adversely affect crop yields, it added.

The report also clarifies that only gross losses of farmland trees were considered during the study and that it did not consider tree gains as a separate class. "We also masked out block plantations. We thus cannot provide information on net tree changes, and our results do not contradict reports concluding that there has been a net increase in planted trees outside forests as a result of tree planting being encouraged and actively carried out in India," the report added.

Vanishing green

• Researchers mapped 600 million farmland trees in 2010-11
• About 11% of those trees disappeared by 2018
• Between 2018 and 2022, another 5 million trees disappeared
• Rise in paddy cultivation due to increased availability of borewell water led to this
• Little evidence to attribute this disappearance to climate change, say researchers