Meet the Forests
Straight east of Beruwala is a dark green scar on the map: Sinharaja. It mostly just sits there, occasionally popping up in the news cycle when someone makes a fuss about deforestation. It’s part of the general marketing spiel for Sri Lanka - rainforests! Nature! Trails! Safaris! World Heritage Site!
But sadly, Sinharaja gets a short shrift. Loopholes in environmental law, weak enforcement, corruption, the construction of hotels and roads without proper EIAs, and a bit of illegal resource extraction here and there have turned Sinharaja into an argument: should we make a bit of extra money off the 30,000 or so annual visitors who show up at the Kudawa entrance to Sinharaja, or should we let the trees and the birds and the beasts be?
SInharaja isn’t the only forest in Sri Lanka going through tough times. The Kanneliya – Dediyagala – Nakiyadeniya (KDN) Forest Complex (KDN), right below is another. Population pressure and the constant push from expanding tea plantations large and small ate holes into KDN [4], until it was considered a degraded rainforest. Now public-private partnerships, like Biodiversity Sri Lanka’s efforts to restore a 12-hectare patch, seem to be all that stands between KDN and a slow death by a thousand cuts [5][6].
The Knuckles Conservation Forest (KCF) has it worse: there’s illegal logging and deforestation; agricultural pressure from tea and cardamom, especially when these practices destroy the topsoil and degrade forest cover. Road construction disrupts wildlife corridors and microclimates; over-extraction of water - yes, that fine Knuckles mineral water - threatens water sources. Then there are all the cottage industries that have sprung up to profit off unregulated tourism - from cheap shacks offering AirBnbs to the gigantic waste management problem slowly building up in that corner.
You don’t hear a lot about Knuckles in the news, but that’s probably because it’s understudied. The best investigation was in 2018 [8], and since then “Tourism Value Chain Analysis” seems to have largely taken over [9], with only an academic cheep here and there about sustainability [10].
Kalugala, nearby, has similar issues, minus the tourism: tea plantations - which are notorious for damaging topsoil - changing the face of the forest cover slowly, year over year [11] - but Kalugala is even more understudied than Knuckles.
Another critical rainforest in the Wet Zone, Yagirala, is threatened by agricultural activities and illegal logging, with the Universities of Sri Jayawardenepura and Kelaniya trying to save the place, and even Commercial Bank pitching in with the Jayawadenepura folk [12][13][14].
And last on our brief list, but not least, we have the Anawilundawa Wetland ecosystem. One of the six RAMSAR wetlands in Sri Lanka, it’s an enormous bird sanctuary. But instead of the pleasant forest these words evoke, it’s currently a hot, dry hell.
Deforestation linked to year-round farming has raised concerns about serious habitat collapse. Essentially: the area has nine tanks for irrigation. Instead of letting the wetland soak and dry in a natural pattern, farmers have been keeping the tank system active year-round, submerging Kumbuk trees and mangroves - and ultimately killing them off. The Anawilundawa Assisted Natural Regeneration of Mangrove project seems to be gamely plugging away on planting enough mangroves to restore the ecosystem, but there’s no way to sugar-coat it: we’ve hurt it bad. [15][16][17]
Honestly, from space, it’s hard to even tell it’s supposed to be a forest reserve.
In context
There are two grand forces at work here. The first is that Sri Lanka, for all that we seem to be hurting our forests, is still a very green country, and we seem to have some obligation to preserve it as such. Not out of some obligation to the world, but so that the living things that call this country home have a place to be.
The second force is that of livelihoods. The general theme running through all of these is that people need to make a living, and absent clearer laws and enforcement, take whatever means they can.
Of course, there are two forks to this particular side of the conversation. One is of greed. A relentless and irresponsible strain of tourism is being pushed under to guise of ‘eco tourism’. Poor planning, poor availability of critical public services - like garbage disposal, environmental assessments and proper permits - all of these things are a slow disaster in exchange for a fast buck. This is greed.
The other fork is that for many Sri Lankans, we seem to offer only a handful of viable paths for survival - take what you can from the environment around you. Anawilundawa is a good example. If forced to chose between a tree and your family’s survival, what would you go for?
Despite these complicated issues, we have broadly done well by our forests. Or rather, our forests have done fine by themselves. Every time I travel out of the country and return, that greenness is the first thing that strikes me.
This isn’t just an impression. The US Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has been monitoring the world's forests at 5 to 10 year intervals since 1946. Their data suggests that, despite all the damage we’ve talked about here, that the overall picture is not an impossible problem; we actually had more hectares of forest cover in 2020 than in 2010. And while we’re not up to 1990 levels, we’re still almost 90% there, despite the country going through tremendous urbanization (and much more serious impacts to greenery around towns and cities).
Despite this decline, with an annual net change rate of -0.15% between 2015-2020, Sri Lanka still maintains substantial forest cover. The majority of these forests (1,863,210 ha) are naturally regenerating, while 249,810 ha are planted forests. As of 2015, most forests (1,775,820 ha) were under public ownership, with a smaller portion (181,570 ha) privately owned. Notably, Sri Lanka has made considerable efforts in forest protection, with 1,258,370 ha (59.11% of forest area) within protected areas as of 2020. In short, we’re not at Mad Max levels, and nor will we be as long as things hold.
But we do have problems to address.
The first problem is of data and montoring. Broad, country-level stats are not very useful for precise fixes. And there, we don’t seem to have a very accurate idea of how much exactly is being lost. Numbers vary widely, not only because they’re collected by different bodies, but also because there seems to be very little effort spent on collecting year-on-year statistics with the same methodology.
For example, an article by the Morning, in 2024, cited figures from World Rainforests. [19]
Which doesn’t quite tally up to Sri Lanka’s Forest Reference Level submission to the UNFCCC [20] or the popular portal Global Forest Watch [21]. Of course, one might ask why we need to rely on third-party statistics like this, when we should be looking at government data directly; the answer would be that Sri Lanka’s own Forest Department has the singularly most useless website of all time, one that barely hosts anything useful, let alone actual statistics [22]; meanwhile, the Ministry of Wildlife and Forest Conversation would rather advertise its bungalows and magazines than actual numbers [23].
The government bodies dedicated to forestry and preservation seem many, and yet they also seem less useful in many cases than thirty people with drones. The first step to addressing problems is to know where they are; we need regular audits of forested areas using technology to monitor changes in forest cover and detect illegal activities early. Many things, like satellite imagery and drone footage, are not only ubiquitous now; they’re cheap. All the satellite imagery we’ve acquired has been for free, and you could get a small armada of DJI drones for the price of a single Mahindra Bolero. It should be a mark of shame that the best publicly available data are those compiled by other countries.
The second involves clear land-use plans - and responsibilities. Ie: heads that can roll when things go wrong. In my conversations with government officials, one of the most astounding facts I kept running across was that the government doesn’t know precisely how much forest it is responsible for. Various pockets of land are owned by various departments; various zones demarcated by gazettes long forgotten; many overlap; and outside of local knowledge, most of what exists at the top seems to get increasingly more diffuse and out-of-date as it goes by.
There’s a partway solution to this: strengthening local groups of people who care. For example, the Wildlife and Nature Protection Society (WNPS) have the authority to do stuff at Anawilundawa. Biodiversity Sri Lanka is restoring degraded rainforest. Can this be taken a step further to actually fund village officials to keep their side of the woods the way it should be?
Third, of course, is the law. We need stringent laws against illegal logging and land encroachment, with clear penalties for violations. This should include a review of current loopholes in environmental laws that allow for exploitation, as well as mechanisms for actually putting these in action. This should also include government authorities that act as regulators, not as hospitality sector folks shilling eco-tourism bungalows - a glaring problem with so many of the bodies responsible. What we need are forest police, not compromised and conflicting objectives across fragmented bodies. Without this, Sri Lanka’s forests are forever at the mercy of highly connected individuals who can bulldoze their visions into being.
A group of young lawyers, writing to the Colombo Telegraph, once called for lifetime imprisonment [3] of people who damage the environment. That might be a little much, but they got many things right. These are problems we can fix, and we should.
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] https://www.sanctuarynaturefoundation.org/article/sinharaja---the-heart-of-south-asian-biodiversity
[2] https://www.dailymirror.lk/news-features/Sinharaja-suffers-from-tourist-development/131-162284
[4] Lindström, S., Mattsson, E., & Nissanka, S. P. (2012). Forest cover change in Sri Lanka: The role of small scale farmers. Applied Geography, 34, 680-692.
[5] https://www.sundaytimes.lk/230723/plus/new-life-for-kanneliyas-degraded-rainforest-525836.html
[6] https://biodiversitysrilanka.org/the-life/
[7] Botejue, W. M. S., & Wattavidanage, J. (2012). Herpetofaunal diversity and distribution in Kalugala proposed forest reserve. Western province of Sri.
[10] Ruzaik, F. (2023). Appraising the Ecotourism Potentials of the Knuckles forest Reserve to Preserve its Sustainability.
[11] Botejue, W. M. S., & Wattavidanage, J. (2012). Herpetofaunal diversity and distribution in Kalugala proposed forest reserve. Western province of Sri.
[12] https://sustainability.sjp.ac.lk/yagirala/
[16] https://www.defence.lk/Article/view_article/4945
[17]https://ceylontoday.lk/2024/05/04/saving-anawilundawa/
[19] https://www.themorning.lk/articles/B0dVupNYGLc3piwvyeOK
[20] https://redd.unfccc.int/media/sl_frl_modified_submission_november_2017.pdf
[21] https://www.globalforestwatch.org/dashboards/country/LKA/?location=WyJjb3VudHJ5IiwiTEtBIl0%3D
[22] https://forestdept.gov.lk/index.php/en/#
[23] https://www.mwfc.gov.lk/department-of-forest-conservation/