Counting Green Wealth: Towards a Future-Ready People's Forest Economy in Himachal Pradesh
08.06.26
Forests are central to Himachal Pradesh's ecological and economic future, contributing to biodiversity conservation, carbon storage, water security, and rural livelihoods. Yet their full potential remains under-realised, partly due to limited information on species distribution, biomass availability, and resource dynamics across landscapes.
Counting Green Wealth: Towards a Future-Ready People's Forest Economy in Himachal Pradesh documents our joint effort with the Himachal Pradesh Forest Department to address this gap. Through a large-scale field campaign, over 500 forest guards collected approximately 2,00,000 geo-tagged, species-tagged tree observations across selected forest ranges. These ground records were combined with satellite imagery and environmental datasets to develop artificial intelligence and machine-learning models for species mapping, biomass estimation, and forest resource assessment.
A key contribution of the report is the development of a spatially explicit framework for evidence-based decision-making across multiple scales. The framework supports forest management, restoration planning, carbon monitoring, climate adaptation, and sustainable forest-based economic development.
By combining field knowledge, scientific methods, and emerging technologies, the report provides a foundation for more informed forest governance and a stronger, climate-resilient forest economy in Himachal Pradesh.