Greener but not taller: LiDAR shows South Asia's forest greening is concentrated in structurally depleted forest

Niti B Mishra , Gargi Chaudhuri

India and China lead the world in greening, and forest greening is widely read as a sign of recovery. Greenness, however, tracks foliage and says little about forest type or height. MODIS greening trends for 2001 to 2024 and a new 10 m map separating natural forest from plantations and tree crops showed that natural forest supplied 65% of South Asia's woody greening. Against least-disturbed forest of the same ecoregion and elevation, GEDI LiDAR showed strongly depleted forest to be 17 percentage points more likely to green than reference-like forest, and over half the greening natural forest was depleted. An independent Landsat record tied depleted forest to past disturbance and its greening to regrowth. Natural forest lacks 592 Tg (15%) of reference aboveground carbon, 60% of the deficit in greening forest. Forest greening in South Asia largely marks regrowth in forest that remains structurally depleted, not forest that has recovered.