December 22, 2020 What do the trees, water bodies, agricultural fields, and forests mean for a city like Delhi? Can we ascribe a monetary value to their contribution? These are some of the questions that a team of Delhi-based scientists recently tried to answer and found that rapid and unplanned urbanisation in Delhi during the last two decades (1998-2018) has happened at the expense of many natural and semi-natural elements and it has resulted in a loss of about Rs56 crore ($7.61 million). The study showed that the biggest contributor to this loss was the decline in the city’s forest cover, which declined from 12,206.97 hectares in 1998 to 5,780.88 hectares in 2018—which is more than half.