Forests in seconds

Miyawaki forests are springing up across Indian cities. Are they a way to restore urban biodiversity or just a quick-fix to achieve greenery?

- HIMANSHU NITNAWARE

SURROUNDED BY heritage buildings, skyscrapers and commercial establishments, a forest of 11,000 trees is growing rapidly in the heart of Pune city. Four years ago, the Maharashtra forest department had planted the saplings of native tree varieties on half-a-hectare barren patch on Taljai hill as per a novel afforestation method. "The forest now stands over 2 m tall and attracts people and birds alike," says Pradeep Sankpal, Range Forest Officer, in-charge of the Taljai hill.

The dense urban forest has been created following a method propounded by Japanese botanist Akira Miyawaki in the 1980s. The method essentially compresses layers of a forest—biomass, tree numbers and canopy spread—to fit on a small patch of land and also reduces the time taken for it to grow. For instance, under the method, saplings are planted with a gap of 30 cm against the conventional practice where the gap between two saplings is 2.4 m. Such dense plantation induces competition among the trees for sunlight, which then grow taller to avoid being shaded by others. As per an estimation by Miyawaki, who has created 1,500 such forests across Japan, India, South East Asia and Brazil, trees in a dense plantation grow 10 times faster than most other plants and result in 30 times denser vegetation in just two to three years.