Deodar trees on the slopes above Srinagar have stood without an axe touching their trunks since December 1996, the month the Supreme Court’s intervention in the T.N. Godavarman case closed off green-tree felling across Jammu and Kashmir’s forests. 

Only the fallen, the diseased and the dry could still be removed. 

Three decades on, those same trees have grown taller, and the policy that protected them has grown almost as fixed as the wood itself.

The reasoning behind the ban held up well at the time. Illegal and poorly regulated timber extraction was stripping J&K’s conifer belt, monitoring was weak, and deodar, kail and fir fetched prices high enough to tempt anyone with an axe and a truck. 

Strong protection made sense in that moment, and it worked.

Nearly thirty years later, a harder question follows: has a policy meant to stop degradation gradually turned into a replacement for real forest management? 

This is not an argument for reopening the hills to indiscriminate logging. It is a question about whether a regime built for the conditions of 1996 still fits the climate, ecology and technology of 2026.

At a conference on nature-based solutions hosted by the Islamic University of Science and Technology, I presented figures using a model called CTree. 

Forest carbon in Jammu and Kashmir rose from about 0.47 billion tonnes of CO2 equivalent in 2000 to around 0.55 billion tonnes in 2025. 

The number sounds like proof of success, and it does suggest these forests keep absorbing carbon at scale. 

But an increase in stored carbon does not by itself prove the........

© Kashmir Observer