The Vanishing Green Cover

On whether a garden city’s green cover be restored.

First published in The Environment, Mar 9, 2023

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Bangalore — the Silicon Valley of India — is facing rapid urbanisation and losing its reputation as a garden city aggressively. Here is a research study conclusion in 2015:

“The cultivated land across India has fragmented significantly resulting in change in land use. The agricultural land has continued to shrink due to rapid urbanization. Nearly 45% land across India is cultivated area and 22% of the land use area is forestland.

The study using Remote Sensing data for the metropolitan fringe of Bengaluru reveals the expansion of built up to 446.55 sq. km … reduced the agriculture land by 212.49 square kilometers.

Over the years, the urban expansion to the fringes has declined the agricultural land by 16.31%. With the increase in requirement of both land and food security, it becomes imperative to protect and conserve the farmlands by policy and guidelines.”

But today, 8 years later, the situation has deteriorated further.

Bangalore’s dense vegetation cover as noted in a different study by T. V. Ramachander, a long-term researcher of energy and environment, has steadily declined from 68.27% (1973) to less than 15% (2013) due to rapid urbanization and land expansion and development of IT companies. See the shocking figure above from the study. Today, the green cover is under 3%.

The study also concluded that “Bangalore has,” only “one tree for every 7 persons,” but “overall improvements in human well-being in urban areas necessitate at least 33% green space that ensures at least 1.15 trees/person.” This is the “least” cover and ideally, they note elsewhere, it should be “8 trees per person,” In 2016, the study warned:

“Reduced vegetation cover with unplanned urbanization has serious implications for the city’s environmental and ecological health. This highlights the city has crossed the threshold of urbanization evident from a range of psychological, social and health impacts for residents. ”

This is not surprising as new buildings continue to spring up in the most unlikely of places with little regard to green cover ratios.

Bangalore is experiencing continuous corporate development, which is driving residential development around the offices, especially in the IT corridor where American (financial, technology) and European (consumer, financial) companies are dominant.

With the upcoming metro train network set to connect this area to the rest of Bangalore, real estate values will appreciate further, thus fueling the vicious cycle of development. Despite local property developers’ claims of environmental consciousness and marketing taglines, there is little action to promote a green cover around their buildings and neighborhoods.

This is where American and European firms can play a critical role by attaching conditions to their office leasing agreements in Bangalore. Without external customer-driven incentives, there is little motivation for developers to change their behavior. Therefore, beyond obtaining a LEED certification, these firms must insist on creating a better ratio of people to green cover in the neighborhoods they intend to lease.

The flooding that occurred in Bangalore last year underlines the critical importance of improving the city’s overall ecological sustainability. For more information on why this is important and how to mitigate it, watch this video from Bangalore Environment Trust.

Consider this: Cities in India with green cover as measured by the Bangalore-based Energy and Wetlands research group are: Gandhinagar (West) has 416 trees for every 100 people followed by Bangalore with 16 trees, Brihan Mumbai with 15 trees and Ahmedabad (West) with 11 trees.

While Bangalore has to plant more trees at a rapid pace to replace the green cover to arrest this decline, if not too late, it also needs to increase awareness and figure out a system that enables its urban denizens to utilize the limited green space for their well-being.

Photo by Sebin Thomas on Unsplash