“The East Kolkata Wetlands feed the city and clean its waste. The city thanks them by shrinking them.”
Kolkata Land Use & Green Cover
Satellite-derived land use change analysis for Kolkata Municipal Corporation area (~206 sq km), 2005-2022
Kolkata was 47% built-up in 2000. By 2019 it was 68%, and by 2022 around 70.5%. Vegetation fell from 22% of the municipal area to 14% over roughly the same period, and 8.2% of the city's land converted directly from vegetation to built surface.
Green space per resident has followed: 5.8 square metres per person in 2005, 2.7 today, against a WHO-referenced benchmark of 9. Meanwhile the East Kolkata Wetlands — a Ramsar site that treats much of the city's sewage at no cost — has shrunk from 125 to 91 square kilometres, a 27% loss, despite formal protection.
About this data
What this page shows
Land class composition for 2005, 2011 and 2019, the built-up trend from 2000 to 2022, East Kolkata Wetlands area over time, the conversion flows between land classes, green cover per capita, and tree cover by ward. Ward 64 around Rabindra Sarobar and Southern Avenue leads on tree cover at 38.2%, followed by Alipore and the Maidan fringe.
Where the data comes from
ISRO Bhuvan LULC classification for 2005, 2011 and 2019, Copernicus Global Land Cover, the East Kolkata Wetlands Management Authority and Ramsar site records, and published satellite-based land use studies.
Limitations worth knowing
Satellite land classification is inherently approximate. Class boundaries are drawn by algorithms working at fixed pixel resolution, and mixed urban surfaces — a tree-lined street, a built plot with a garden — get assigned to one class or another in ways that shift between products and years. Percentages here are derived from several such studies rather than a single consistent series, so the direction of change is far more trustworthy than any individual figure. Ward-level tree cover in particular is indicative. The East Kolkata Wetlands area estimates also vary between sources depending on where the boundary of the Ramsar site is drawn.
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