India added around 2.1 million hectares of tropical dry woodland between 2014 and 2024, an area larger than Wales, even as native woodlands continued to disappear within the country’s forest reserves. That is according to researchers at the University of Manchester’s Global Development Institute, whose decade-long satellite analysis was published in the journal Environmental Research Letters on 30 April.
Mapping woodland change at 30-metre resolution across India, the team recorded a gross gain of 2.10 million hectares, offset by a loss of 0.29 million hectares, leaving a net increase of 1.80 million hectares. The work draws on Landsat imagery and machine learning to reconstruct annual woodland cover across a country holding one of the largest dry woodland extents on Earth.
Within government-administered land, where most of the country’s remaining native dry woodlands sit, the analysis recorded a loss of 0.17 million hectares, equal to 58 per cent of all woodland lost over the period. Outside those boundaries, across farmland and plantation landscapes, the woodland area rose by around 0.78 million hectares.
Gains inside state forests are likely tied to major restoration efforts, including the Green India Mission, the Compensatory Afforestation Fund and the National Afforestation Programme. Those schemes sit behind India’s pledge to raise forest cover to 33 per cent and restore 26 million hectares of woodland by 2030 under the Bonn Challenge.
Much of the gain outside government land, however, is likely the result of commercial timber and tree-crop plantations rather than the recovery of native forest, with palm oil and coconut plantings accounting for tens of thousands of hectares in states such as Andhra Pradesh and Gujarat. The authors warn that national figures showing rising tree cover do not necessarily indicate that natural forests are recovering.
Lead author Dhanapal Govindarajulu said the headline figures hide important differences in what is actually growing.
“Not all woodland gains are the same,” Govindarajulu said.
State-level patterns varied sharply, with Telangana, Chhattisgarh and Odisha losing close to 2 per cent of their woodland on government land, whilst Punjab, Rajasthan, Karnataka and Haryana posted gains of over 40 per cent. The annual maps had a mean overall accuracy of 0.93, higher than those of global datasets, which the authors say underestimate dry woodland extent and overstate restoration potential.
Govindarajulu and colleagues conclude that “India’s dryland reforestation frontiers are unlikely to offset the environmental degradation” driven by continued clearing inside its native forests, where 0.17 million hectares of woodland were lost over the decade.
For further information: Govindarajulu, D., Foster, T., Pritchard, R., Baumann, M., Kuemmerle, T., Morey, B., Parmar, A., Chhatre, A., & Oldekop, J. A. (2026). Contrasting patterns of deforestation and reforestation in India’s tropical dry woodlands. Environmental Research Letters, 21(9), 094011. https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ae61cb
