New Delhi, Nov. 30: India has added forest cover over an area only half the size of Howrah district in two years, losing moderately dense forests and adding inferior-quality jungles, the latest biennial assessment has shown.

The 2009 assessment from the Forest Survey of India, Dehra Dun, has shown that India gained only 728sqkm of forest cover with almost all the gains through open forests where canopy density is less than 40 per cent.

India’s total forest cover during the assessment period of 2007 was about 690,899sqkm, about one-fifth of the country’s total geographic area, but about 40 per cent of this is degraded open forest, according to the report.

“So far, we’ve been paying too much attention to quantity and not to quality,” said Jairam Ramesh, the minister of environment and forests. “About 40 per cent of our forests are degraded with no significant green cover,” he said.

The assessment based on satellite imagery and ground observations shows that between 2005 and 2007, India gained 1,626sqkm of open forests and 38sqkm of very dense forests, but lost 936 sqkm of moderately dense forests.

Sixteen states have lost forest cover between 2005 and 2007, the report said, listing the greatest losses in Andhra Pradesh, Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Chhattisgarh, and Nagaland. It said mining in Chhattisgarh, encroachment in insurgency-affected areas in Assam and Chhattisgarh, and shifting cultivation in Arunachal Pradesh and Nagaland were among factors that had caused the forest area to shrink.

While the FSI assessments are a once-in-two-years exercise, Ramesh said there was a need to introduce more frequent assessments of ecologically sensitive areas such as the forests of central India, the Northeast and Western Ghats.

Forest assessment methods have changed over the years, but Ramesh said a broad comparison of forest cover data over the past decade suggested that India had been adding 300,000 hectares of forest cover each year.

Brazil and Indonesia lost about 2.5 million hectares each year, while India gained forest cover, Ramesh said. Forest cover is a key issue in ongoing climate change talks because of the potential for trees to take up carbon dioxide.

India has estimated that its existing forest and tree cover is enough to neutralise 11 per cent of the country’s total greenhouse gas emissions. This is equivalent to 100 per cent emissions from energy in the household and transport sectors.

The assessment has for the first time computed forest-to-land ratio, excluding areas above the tree line — higher than 4,000m above sea level. When the areas are excluded, forest cover increases to 25 per cent.