Moa Jamir
Reflections from two reports
Two recent independent reports have highlighted why stakeholders in Nagaland, particularly those at the helms of affairs, should rouse from tokenism and take concretes steps to safeguard the State’s reportedly deteriorating environmental status.
The first report is the ‘Desertification and Land Degradation Atlas of India’ released in June 2020, which informed that exactly 50% of the total geographical area of Nagaland was undergoing Desertification/Land Degradation (DLD) during the 2018-19 timeframe.
The report published by the Space Applications Centre (SAC), Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), Ahmedabad observed that out of the State’s total geographical area (TGA) of 16, 57,900 hectare (ha), 8, 28,943 ha was undergoing DLD during the assessed period.
The area under the process of DLD in Nagaland, over the last 15 years as per the report, has increased from just 38.74% of the State’s TGA to 47.45% during 2011-13. By 2018-19, the DLD area increased by 2.55% (42,265 ha) to 50% in 2018-19.
“Land degradation is decline in productivity of land in terms of “bio-diversity and economy, resulting from various causes including climate and human induced factors, leading to loss of ecosystem,” the Atlas explained. “Desertification is referred as land degradation occurring in arid, semi-arid and dry sub-humid regions and the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) had identified it as one of the most challenging environmental concerns of the present and future,” it added.
Among the chief contributors to the process of DLD in Nagaland was vegetation degradation described as “reduction in the biomass and/or decline in the vegetative ground cover, as a result of deforestation and/or overgrazing.” Other forms of ‘natural’ DLD included water erosion, waterlogging, soil salinity, mass movement, and frost heaving and shattering.
Most recently on October 12, the Down To Earth in an analysis of the University of Maryland’s forest global change data reported that the North East region lost 79 per cent of its tree cover in 2020, the biggest dip in the country. India lost close to 143,000 hectares of forest cover in 2020.
Most importantly, the analysis observed that while Assam contributed the most (14.1%) to the national tree cover loss from 2001 through 2020, Nagaland saw its forest cover shrink the fastest since 2001, suffering a 17% drop in the two decades.
According to the Down to Earth, researchers from the University of Maryland processed and analysed over a million satellite images to demonstrate the loss. Tree cover loss is termed as “complete removal of tree cover canopy.”
The two reports are completely independent of each other, yet the observations based on real-time scientific data are more or less similar. Without resorting to other reports, it is a clear indication that corrective measures should be adopted to preserve the State’s fragile but degrading ecosystem as an imperative, not a mere vision.
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