Our towns and cities are under pressure, there is a danger of our very existence. Environmental, social and economic demands are making it difficult for us to create healthy, liveable and economically resilient places. Though it is largely our own creation -
- more vehicles on road,
- more air conditioners ,
- emission from factories
all these have added to alarmingly dangerous high scale of carbon di oxide emission. As we strive to improve our urban environments and tackle city pressures, we are discovering the extent to which trees are a significant contributory factor in achieving these aims. In the last few years a growing body of research has made it clear that trees are a cost-effective way of bringing a wide range of benefits to the environment, to individual people and to society as a whole.
Forests cover across the is alarmingly depleted due our greed to create more urban space and ever increasing consumption of various products made out of wood. So thhe green space is depleting. Efforts are being made to grow trees in urban space, but it is more into exotic show trees. There is urgent need to reverse this trend.
Today, I was watching TED talk and heard a young Indian speaker Shubhendu Sharma advocating a case for creation of forest in the urban space. The idea is quite radical, in case it is scaled up, it can change the way we live.
The founder of 'Afforest', a three year old company, Shubhendu works towards reforestation and bringing back greenery into urban spaces. 'Afforestt' is helping to create dense forests with three to five trees per square metre, in areas as small as 100 square meter, just within three years, using a unique process called the Miyawaki Method.
It all started when Sudhendhu was working at Toyota four years ago where he met Dr Akira Miyawaki, who gave a presentation about the afforestation methodology which makes forests grow ten times faster. He was impressed with Miyawaki’s work and joined his team as a volunteer to cultivate a forest in the Toyota factory premises
In the beginning , Shubhendu says it’s difficult to get takers for this concept. 'Our very first challenge was to find our first customer, which ended up being a furniture company in Stuttgart, who said they’d plant a tree for every piece of furniture that they sell, which worked out quite well,' he says. Over the course of the last three years, the company has grown forests for residential as well as corporate clients in cities like Delhi, Bangalore, Nainital, Indore, Pune and many more cities His team has already planted more than 36000 trees and hopes to bring back about 30 percent of total forest cover India needs to balance its ecology.
Now Shubhendu’s business is established , his company provides two kinds of services: consultations and end to end services, the latter of which is presently provided in Bangalore. The consultations involves giving information and training to the client, who will in turn execute the process; whereas in end to end service, the team takes care of everything from recce of the area to planting saplings.
Shubhendu now plans to dedicate the rest of the year to research and development to take afforestation to a wider base, while shifting administrative duties of the company to someone else for a while. “I want to enable anyone and everyone to take up afforestation. I would like to build a new platform to spread the message. I’m also working along with a California based company Soil IQ, where we’re developing hardware that will allow us to test soil through a probe, which is now usually done through lab tests,” he explains.
Shubhendu is also looking at creating forests in public spaces. “So instead of having parks with green lawns, you can walk through dense forests. This will, however, only work out if the public contributes small amounts of money, so they can see greener spaces in their everyday environment,” he says.
Here’s how it works. It takes six steps.
1. First, you start with soil, identify what nutrition the soil lacks.
2. Then identify what species we should be growing in this soil, depending on climate and local condition.
3. Thereafter identify locally abundant biomass available in that region to give the soil whatever nourishment it needs. This is typically an agricultural or industrial byproduct — like chicken manure or press mud, a byproduct of sugar production — but it can be almost anything. It must come from within 50 kilometers of the site, which means we have to be flexible.
4. Once the soil amended to a depth of one meter, plant saplings that are up to 80 centimeters high, packing them in very densely — three to five saplings per square meter.
5. The forest itself must cover a 100-square-meter minimum area. This grows into a forest so dense that after eight months, sunlight can’t reach the ground. At this point, every drop of rain that falls is conserved, and every leaf that falls is converted into humus. The more the forest grows, the more it generates nutrients for itself, accelerating further growth. This density also means that individual trees begin competing for sunlight — another reason these forests grow so fast.
6. The forest needs to be watered and weeded for the first two or three years, at which point it becomes self-sustaining. After that, it’s best to disturb the forest as little as possible to allow its ecosystem, including birds and animals, to become established. The ground water level of the surrounding area also improves.
In urban space, such green areas also improve air quality, increase biodiversity, and reduce the heat-island effect, which improves the micro climates of residential areas. Natural native forests are beneficial because they require no maintenance, in contrast to most urban landscaping, which is immensely resource-intensive, diminishing its ecological value.
In a city like Bombay, where people are finding hard to find place to live, creating a forest by an individual is not possible,
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| this foorest spcae is created in three years time in the backspace of a house in Banglore |
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