Introduction

In a previous project we built a nearly one-to-one representation of the city of Colombo in Cities: Skylines. We tried to get as close as humanly possible in terms of the road network, in terms of population numbers, in terms of how people move in and out of the city, using official data sources and working with university departments to do so. And one of the things we were consistently struck by is how overstressed the city of Colombo is.

Colombo is a relatively small city by international standards. It’s about 37 square kilometers and it has a floating population of about a million. And it has problems: it’s largely unplanned (or has been planned by idiots). Its roads are certainly too small to accommodate all the traffic flowing through it. It has very little parking space. It has very little in the way of parks and third spaces. And over the years, as commercial activity and population pressure has increased, Colombo has been forced to extend both up and out, taking dense urbanization into the suburbs or into what used to be suburbs. The suburbs in turn are now full-fledged urban areas, and the city sprawls ever outwards, shredding whatever little greenery it has left. 

Which got us thinking about the country as a whole. Every one of us, wherever we live, has some understanding of our neighborhood. I can pontificate about Colombo because I’ve lived here for nearly two decades now and I can talk about the transformations that I’ve seen. Likewise, my colleague Fairooz who is translating this article can talk about his own neighborhood of Kattankudy, and how that has changed over the years. But how do we zoom out and see how everything has changed in one go?

To answer this question, this year we acquired satellite imagery from the European Space Agency’s Sentinel 2 satellites. At 10 square meters per pixel these are not the most resolving satellites available -  that would be expensive and private and commercial aerospace stuff - but it’s more than good enough for public use. Using data from these satellites, we compiled maps and imagery for Sri Lanka from 2017 to 2024 [1]. 

And here is what we saw.

The Kilinochchi food belt 

In 2018, the area between Nallur, Kilinochchi and Kandavalai looked like this.

In 2024, it looks like this: 

Kilinochchi is a very agricultural area. As far back as 2015, government estimates suggested that almost 25% of the area was paddy, that about 13% were home gardens, and about 24% were forest[2][3]. By now, it looks like those patches of semi-forest land in the middle have been filled up - from the east to the west, there’s a much broader belt of agriculture. 

This broadly tracks certain large infrastructure schemes in the area. Since 2017, at least, the Agriculture folks in government have been attempting to restore unused agricultural land, including in Kilinochchi [4]. The Regional Agriculture and Research Development Center is a thing (albeit quite understaffed) and people working on the sector seem to be pushing crops that might suit the area better. Plans have also existed at least since 2017 to upgrade waterways, roads, and bring in large industry (MAS Active, MAS Vidiyal, KIST, etc), with varying degrees of resource allocation and success. 

At least some of this stuff seems to have worked, at least from a big picture perspective. 2022 statistics from the UDA put paddy at 44% of the land use of Kilinochchi [6]. 

However, Kilinochchi remains poor, with over 18% of its headcount below the poverty line as of 2022, and despite the predominantly agricultural character was one of the hardest hit during the agricultural collapse brought about by Gotabhaya’s fertilizer ban [6][7]. Time (and more imagery) will tell whether plans like the ADB’s [8] $250 million+ drinking water project and rural road development plan [9] will help this situation. 

This is also where things get thorny with regard to environmental loss. Like it or not, Sri Lankan agriculture is of the slash-and-burn variety [10]. Low-tech agriculture means we go horizontal rather than vertical. Inevitably, large amounts of tree cover vanish, replaced by bare land that struggles to cool itself or retain water. Kilinochchi has largely kept the forests at its borders, but if you pay close attention, you can see the browning at the edges of roads, and the slow loss of what was once green.

Kurunegala, Anuradhapura, Vavuniya

Speaking of loss, we next have two contenders for the biggest self-harm over these years.

Here’s the midpoint of this region in 2018:

And here it is in 2024:

Our reaction to this was a wince. A region famous for scorching temperatures, poor water supply, livelihoods (both human and animal) that rely heavily on forests is . . . even more deforested now, and slowly turning into a dust bowl of parched land in the middle of the country.  

A 2023 research paper points out exactly what we’re seeing here: Between 2000 and 2020, Kurunegala experienced a 9.82% decrease in forest cover. Similarly, Anuradhapura reported a 12.06% loss of forest cover from 2000 to 2020. Both areas have faced significant pressure from agricultural practices, urbanization, and infrastructure development, contributing to the decline in natural vegetation. There’s also the specter of illegal logging and land encroachment into forested areas for settlement purposes. 

We can quite literally see it happen. Pixels that were once scrub-like green are being converted into built-up areas and flattened into agricultural land. Pockets of dense green (bottom, center-left) have vanished altogether.

Vavuniya isn’t mentioned in the paper, but the increasing loss extends through this entire triangle. The general footprint of human activity (left, 2018) is growing (right, 2024) even in smaller villages.

Hambantota rising

Perhaps we might be excused for pointing out the silver lining: from a distance, Hambantota appears to be re-greening. Here it is in 2018:

And here it is in 2024:

Hambantota went through a hell of a lot of forced development: from 2008 to 2019, under multiple Rajapaksa regimes, Hambantota went through a massive amount of building and deforestation. Built-up areas increased by a reported growth of 27.66% from 2008 to 2019; forest cover dropped by a whopping 18.88%, and we have a feeling those statistics are severely underreported [12].  For example, we saw the dredging of the Karagan Lewaya Lagoon, where approximately 40,000 m³ of sand was removed [13]. 

And for what? Hubris, of course; the desire to mimic the kings of old and establish not just a dynasty, but a capital. The good news is that Hambantota has been on the receiving end of a lot of repair work, from coastal reforestation [14] to fruit crops, water tank repair, and sustainable horticulture training that kicked off in 2017 [15]. And presumably the jungle kept growing around the disastrous airport and took back some of what was once wasted. Whether Hambantota will ever be what the Rajapaksas wanted it to be remains to be seen, but at least it shows that damage can be repaired, if not reversed. 

Takeaways

Takeaways from this type of broad, sweeping analysis is always a little thorny. On one hand, people need space to live, and every region has its own little problems that need to be sorted out. The delicate balance of human life and environmental impact is something that any reasonable person can spend decades just thinking about, let alone figuring out impacts; and all this has to happen in a country with little budget and (historically) garbage-tier policy stability. 

There are some obvious things we can, and probably should do. 

Crack down on illegal logging and deforesting. Goes without saying. 

Get cities into high-rises. This is something we noticed from the satellite imagery. Colombo is not the only place with a high population density - parts of Batticaloa make Colombo look positively spacious. But high-rises are rare, meaning lots of small, cramped dwellings trying desperately to fit into a small amount of available land. We could make things much more comfortable for people by helping them expand vertically.

Agricultural reforms. This, I believe, might be even more impactful. As we outlined in our work on agriculture, Sri Lanka, despite our agricultural pride, has a whole farming industry that simply doesn’t live up to the hype. This is because we form in an extraordinarily wasteful manner. They use a large amount of human labour, not a lot of technology; our products are not only more expensive to create but we are unable to create them in the bulk required to feed the country. At the same time, farmers don’t profit from this either; they live extraordinarily difficult lives trying to eke out a living. Meanwhile, this wasteful system takes up flattest land in the country. 

For what?

I am not suggesting anything extreme; we are not talking about the abolishing of the agricultural system or anything like that. But there is a much smarter way of doing this, improving access to basic things like tractors and utilities, making lives easier, and making farmers more productive. Perhaps it’s time to set aside the old steady input-output model and start exploring things like vertical farms and community gardens en masse. As we have seen in Hambantota, there are also ways of making farming more sustainable by encouraging farmers to grow things outside the usual monocrops. Fruit, for example, is a pretty good model, and underutilized in this country. 

If we are going to give up land in this manner, we should at least experiment, so that we know what works effectively, and we know what can be made to work sustainably. There simply has to be a better way than growing nothing but rice and starving in the next economic collapse. 

And lastly, we need building guidelines and actual enforcement, especially involving green spaces. Pouring over these images of our country, it’s obvious that we need to build cities and towns in a particular pattern. We build first to survive. Then come the endless waves of every town's economy: the petrol station, the bridal salon, the infinite permutations of shops that sell trinkets, the tuition classes, the obligatory Bata and DSI, the Abans and the Singers. The larger houses, muscling in, and the roads widening. And at some point we look around and realize that everything looks like a shittier version of Borella. That it is uncomfortable to exist, because to get there we cut and chopped everything that wasn’t approved or economically productive. I’ve seen this happen over and over again, not just in imagery, but in the towns I’ve lived in - from Godakawela to Ragama to Horana.

At some point we have to take a leaf out of the books of other countries that have successfully managed to implement regulations so that future citizens can at least sit under the shade of trees that they weren’t allowed to cut down. If we don’t, we know what happens: we get cities like Colombo, where large amounts of concrete and tarmac makes an environment that has incredible amounts of heat stress [16][17]18]. Where the dead tree gives no shelter, and the cricket no relief; and where the luxury of shade is typically reserved only for the rich who can afford to live in very high priced areas.

We are obviously in the realm of opinion and polemics, but that’s part and parcel of this sort of conclusion: the only other option is to resort to faux academic politeness and say that more research is required.

Acknowledgements

This work was created by Watchdog Sri Lanka (Appendix) as a part of the project Building Tools to Strengthen Pluralist, Inclusive and Fact-based Public Discourse, conducted by LIRNEasia. LIRNEasia (www.lirneasia.net) is a pro-poor, pro-market regional digital policy think tank. The project is conducted in partnership with the Strengthening Social Cohesion and Peace in Sri Lanka (SCOPE) programme, co-funded by the European Union and German Federal Foreign Office. SCOPE is implemented by GIZ in partnership with the Ministry of Justice, Prisons Affairs and Constitutional Reforms.

References:

[1] The actual data files of course are too large to share in one place - a single image for a single year can span 6 gigabytes -  but we have made reduced JPEG versions, still at very high resolution, available for free for you here on our Github.

[2] https://luppd.gov.lk/images/content_image/downloads/pdf/llrc_kilinochchi_district.pdf

[3] https://luppd.gov.lk/images/Kilinochchi_District_compressed.pdf

[4] https://www.harti.gov.lk/images/download/reasearch_report/new1/webR_238_Final_report.pdf

[5] 

https://www.uda.gov.lk/attachments/dev-plans-2023-2033/killinochchi2024.pdf

[6] https://www.wfp.org/news/food-insecurity-improves-sri-lanka-prevails-within-specific-regions

[7] See our own reporting on the agricultural crisis

[8] https://www.adb.org/projects/37378-013/main

[9] https://www.adb.org/projects/50301-002/main

[10] Gunasena, H. P. M., & Pushpakumara, D. K. N. G. (2015). Chena cultivation in Sri Lanka: prospects for agroforestry interventionsna cultivation in Sri Lanka: prospects for agroforestry interventions. Shifting cultivation and environmental change: indigenous people, agriculture and forest conservation. Routledge, New York, 199-220. 

[11] Kaushalya, G. N. (2023). Forest and Natural Vegetation Cover Loss Over 2000 to 2020 in Sri Lanka; A Canopy Density Base Analysis. In Proceedings of International Forestry and Environment Symposium (Vol. 27).

[12] Edirisooriya, K. V. U. I., Senevirathna, E. M. T. K., Dheerasinghe, G. W. M. M. K., & Dauglas, D. L. P. M. (2021). ANALYSIS OF LAND USE/LAND COVER CHANGES IN HAMBANTOTA DIVISIONAL SECRETARIAT DIVISION FROM 2008 TO 2019 USING REMOTE SENSING AND GIS TECHNIQUES.

[13] https://www.chathamhouse.org/2020/03/chinese-investment-and-bri-sri-lanka-0/2-labour-and-environment

[14] https://balkanecologyproject.blogspot.com/2024/05/discovering-tropics-hambantota-district.html

[15] https://www.agrimin.gov.lk/web/images/pdf/performance/2017-english-performence.pdf

[16] Fonseka, H. P. U., Zhang, H., Sun, Y., Su, H., Lin, H., & Lin, Y. (2019). Urbanization and its impacts on land surface temperature in Colombo metropolitan area, Sri Lanka, from 1988 to 2016. Remote Sensing, 11(8), 957.

[17] Emmanuel, R. (2005). Thermal comfort implications of urbanization in a warm-humid city: the Colombo Metropolitan Region (CMR), Sri Lanka. Building and environment, 40(12), 1591-1601.

[18] Dmdok, D., & Kakm, K. (2021). Urbanization of Colombo City and Its Impact on Land Surface Temperature from 2001-2019. American Journal of Environmental Protection, 10(3), 66-76.