A Study of Urbanization and Ecosystem Services of Guwahati City from Forest Footprint Perspective

Abstract

The future is urban and it is projected that by 2030, 56% of the population of the developing countries would be living in cities. To meet the overgrowing demand of development natural capital like forests, land and water are being converted into man made capital. The present study is of Guwahati city which is located in the North East region of India. The study area comprises of the areas under Guwahati Metropolitan Development Authority. Guwahati is a growing city with a population of 8,394 in 1891 and 968549 in 2011. The study focuses on the impact of the growth of the city on the forest areas within it. To do so, secondary data of about 100 years (from 1911 to 2015) of forests and the urban growth have been analyzed. The focus of the study is on the forest because, forests play a dual role by providing forestry and wood based natural resources for food, energy and development thus acting as source and at the same time regulate the environment by sequestering carbon dioxide gas emissions, thereby acting as sink. It has been seen from literature review that expansion of city often takes place with the conversion of available forested areas, resulting in loss of ecological services that the forests provide. Therefore, in this study an attempt has been made to understand urbanization from the ecological footprint (forestry) perspective. In this respect, a modified definition of forest footprint has been proposed. The analysis shows that large forest areas were degraded in urbanization process, resulting in denudation of hills, high surface run off and urban flooding. The direct forest footprint of the Guwahati city comes to 0.25. With the reduction in the per capita availability forests from 4866 sq.m in 1911 to 22.06 sq.m in 2015, the Ecological footprint of the city has gone up so much that 5360 sq.km of forests would now be required in 2015 to mitigate the carbon emissions. The city needs to reduce its carbon footprint as well as enhance its carbon sequestration potential many times to become an eco-city.