Web Desk
Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan Monday inaugurated what the officials claim, the world’s biggest Miyawaki urban forest in the eastern city of Lahore under the 10 Billion Tree Tsunami project.
The forest has been developed on over 100 kanals ( 12.5 acres of land) having a total of 165,000 plants that will grow 10 times quicker than in a normal forest owing to the unique Miyawaki technique. It uses specialised land preparation as well as indigenous varieties with varying growth rates to produce fast growing urban forests.
Another 53 Miyawaki forests are being grown in different parts of Lahore to create sinks for carbon as well as for better pollution abatement in the city. All have been geo-tagged to monitor their growth and development.
“Humans have done such a disservice to God’s blessings, to this world, that many things – rising sea levels for instance because of warming and emissions – cannot come back to how they were before,” PM Imran Khan said while inaugurating the Miyawaki forest near Saggian entry point of the historic city.
“All of us living in the world today, if we do all we can, maybe we can save the world from even worse harm to come,” he said.
“Miyawaki forests absorb the most carbon and are good for ensuring a suitable atmosphere and reducing pollution,” he said.
“Lahore has turned into the most polluted city of the country. I’m glad that this is the beginning of growing the largest forest in the world. We dedicate this initiative to Profesor Miyawaki, who was the founder of this forestation technique.”
The prime minister cited a report about climate change, saying that the changes may not be reversed. “But if we try our best, we can still avoid some of the dangers of it.”
The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said Monday that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land. Even the starkest measures to reduce emissions, it said, would not prevent a global warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius, and the extreme weather and rising sea levels resulting from that change.
Since the tree planting drive started in 2018, Pakistan has 1 billion more trees and is planting another 500 million during the monsoon season.
“If you are concerned about your children and their future, the least you can do is plant one tree and take care of it,” the premier said.
As the second largest city in Pakistan, Lahore has a surveyed population of more than 11 million. Urban sprawl is evidenced by the fact that the city’s population nearly doubled in merely 20 years (Pakistan Bureau of Statistics 2018). Detailed land cover change analysis of the district is given in the table below.
Thefigures indicate that during the 7-year period from 2010 to 2017, the tree cover in Lahore fell by nearly 75 per cent.
In order to develop green spaces in urban areas, Government of the Punjab piloted the Miyawaki method to regenerate native forests in Lahore. Named after the Japanese botanist Akira Miyawaki, the Miyawaki method is a forest regeneration technique that aims to recreate self-sustaining multilayered indigenous forests on degraded land with little to no human intervention. The goal is restoring forest ecosystems indigenous to the habitat by promoting natural vegetation.
The Miyawaki method has been successfully used to regenerate forests with indigenous species in more than 38 countries.
