Banyan, of The Economist fame, has an interesting articleon the trade-offs between trees and infrastructure and how policy makers in India are ill-equipped to make those trade-offs. It is a common sight for people to protest against cutting down of trees in India’s urban centres for road widening projects or other such infrastructure projects. And it is quite understandable - almost all of India’s cities have become heat islands and temperatures in summer are soaring to extreme levels.
Around 10 cities in India have already attained a temperature of 46 degrees celsius and are hottest in the world now. Another news that made the rounds was that India has 90 out of the 100 hottest cities in the world. Poor design of the cities, with no or few dedicated green spaces, means that the fight for the few roadside trees become even more important. The protests against such projects seems understandable in the face of hare-brained infrastructure projects that are clearly not in the public interest and which involves going through eco-sensitive zones.
Unfortunately, most of the time, this is poised as a binary choice - either more infrastructure or more trees. India needs both - more trees to decrease temperatures, to sustain biodiversity and I would argue even for the aesthetic of it and more construction for housing, mobility, growth and employment. India’s cities are dysfunctional with poor planning, poor roads and infrastructure and lots of traffic. For both public transport such as metros and buses and even for private vehicles, you need better roads, which might involve cutting down trees.
One of the big problems is that we just don’t have enough data. We don’t know how many trees are currently there in the city. And it is hard to know whether promises to plant extra trees to make up for lost ones have been kept, since comprehensive data are rarely published. As the Economist argues, “without data to argue with, environmental types resort to appeals to emotion and circular logic”. There’s a deep mistrust of the state here and rightfully so, given that the state has taken up projects of cutting down trees silently in the middle of the night or quickly before activists can organise.
I agree with the Economist here, when they say:
There is a better way to balance the trade-offs between nature and urbanisation than to do both badly. But that would require courage on the part of the state: to release data, to publish plans and to persuade the people it nominally serves. And it would require citizens to give up on some trees, which they would surely do if given a chance to offer feedback and to have it taken seriously.
We also need better measurement and projection. What is the net impact of a tree to the environment? For instance, by saving a tree and not widening the road, if that creates a significant traffic backlog, is the net environmental impact of the tree positive or negative? Does the tree compensate for the excess burning of petrol? This is akin to people imagining that an organic cotton bag is naturally better for the environment than a single-use plastic, but it is not.