Hyderabad: Hyderabad could have a meagre 2.5 per cent of the city’s geographical mass covered with trees if the situation is not rectified now, a group of researchers has warned. The city had 4.06 per cent tree cover in 1989.
In contrast, the built-up area in Hyderabad has gone up from 1.75 per cent in 1989 to 13.55 per cent by 2009 and is projected to increase to 64.6 per cent by 2029. This means more than two-thirds of the city will be covered in concrete in a matter of 13 years. This will increase temperatures and impact groundwater levels
A study by researchers from the Centre for Ecological Sciences of the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, says that while tree cover will reduce, land use will steeply increase due to improperly planned urbanisation.
While the IISc team predicts that tree cover will fall to 3.03 per cent by 2019, HMDA on its website claims that Hyderabad had 4.5 per cent green cover until 1995 which has grown to 26 per cent or a five-fold leap.
Dr Bharath Aithal, a researcher from IISc, said the HMDA calculation was wrong. “It means one-fourth of Hyderabad is green which is not true. They must have calculated as per their plantations drives which are successful mostly on paper. We recently took samples to calculate green cover for which results are yet to be out but we expect that there would be a marginal increase of 0.5-1 per cent from the 2009 figure,” he said. Dr Aithal said, “Our predictions are based on the HMDA’s city development plan, observations on ground and other criteria. I observed that HMDA has not given importance to conservation of natural drains which are important for replenishment of lakes. These maintain groundwater levels which are necessary to sustain robust tree cover.”
He said sapling plantation drives will be effective only if the species are native, which has not been the case till now. The research, titled Modelling and Visualisation of Urban Trajectory, was conducted in Hyderabad, Ahmedabad, Kolkata and Bhopal by six researchers from the IISc.
