By Muhammad Luqman
The development authority of Pakistan’s eastern city of Lahore has recently raised an urban forest in upscale locality of Gulberg in a bid to mitigate the sufferings of Lahorites who have been facing the environmental degradation in the form of smog in winter and poor air quality round the year.
The forest grown by using Miyawaki technique over an area of 2860 square meters , is the first ever efforts on the government level to increase the vegetative cover in the urban centres of Pakistan.
Pakistan’s largest real estate portal Zameen.com and renowned developer Izhar-Monnoo Group have contributed financially and technically to make this dream come true.
The development authority plans to replicate this idea in other parts of the city too if the pilot project proves a success story.
Prime Minister Imran Khan’s government has launched a tree plantation campaign given the name of billion tree tsunami to increase under forest area in Pakistan which presently has less than four percent of its land under forests. Of these, 200 million trees will be planted in Punjab, the largest province of the country.
An NGO has already experimented such a project in southern city of Karachi.
Shahzad Qureshi, a young entrepreneur heading the NGO Urban Forest, has grown a small forest in the port city, showing that it is something that can be done.
“Growing plants has the synergistic advantage of cooling urban heat, carbon sequestration, clean air, and aesthetics,” he said.
In the neighbouring India, hundreds of Miyawaki urban gardens have been grown in the states of Andhra Pradesh and Kerala.
India has lost a tree cover of almost 1.6 million hectares between 2001 and 2018 , according to a study released by the World Resources Institute.
Akira Miyawaki, the earliest known pioneer of this system used potential natural vegetation (the species that would exist at a given location if not impacted by human activities), phytosociology (ways in which plant species interact with each other) and a four-layered system of planting, to design his own system for planting forests.
The Miyawaki method, developed by a Japanese Botanist, also called the Potted Seedling Method, is an afforestation technique that uses native species to create dense, multilayered forests.
