Kolkata: A study by IIT Kharagpur has found that while India's farm lands show significant “greening,” forest health is steadily declining due to reduced photosynthetic efficiency, which measures how effectively plants convert light into growth energy.

Led by Prof Jayanarayanan Kuttippurath and Rahul Kashyap from the Centre for Ocean, River, Atmosphere and Land Sciences at IIT Kharagpur, the study shows that forest photosynthetic efficiency declined by 5 per cent between 2010-2019 compared to 2000-2009. The decline is most pronounced in pristine forests of the Eastern Himalaya, Western Ghats, and Indo-Gangetic Plains.

“Forests show low resilience to warming, drying, land and atmospheric aridity, and wildfires, with only 16 per cent exhibiting high integrity,” the researchers noted. Factors contributing to forest degradation include global warming, wildfires, landslides, deforestation, mining, and development activities.

The study warns that weakened forest carbon sinks threaten biodiversity, timber production, forest-dweller livelihoods, and long-term climate resilience. Future climate change and human interventions may accelerate forest degradation, leading to savannisation in some regions.

Researchers emphasised the urgent need to preserve indigenous forests, adopt sustainable management, implement scientific afforestation programmes, reduce carbon emissions, and deploy advanced carbon capture technologies. These steps are critical to achieving sustainability and India's net zero emissions target by 2070, they said.