Trees literally make a place livable by reducing the day-time temperature by as much as five degrees Centigrade. They bring down air pollution by releasingoxygen and trapping dust. Greenery also muffles noise by deflecting and absorbing sound waves.
An avenue of flowering trees lifts your spirits and the look of the locality. Trees create carbon sinks and raise the water table. Last but not the least, they add to the biodiversity by attracting birds and insects.
Reverence for trees
An example of the new-found reverence for trees is the recent decision of the municipal corporation of Mumbai to afforest a three-acre plot abutting the Mithi river at Marol. The suburb has the lowest tree cover in the city as result of which it has become a heat island, an urbanized area that experiences higher temperatures than outlying areas.
Marol was chosen after the Mumbai Climate Action Plan cited a study indicating a five degrees Centigrade increase in land surface temperature along the route of the Metro Line 1 over a decade, before and after it was built.
Mini-forests
The Mumbai Climate Action Plan notes that the city lost 2,028 hectares of tree cover between 2016 and 2021. This amounts to one-and-a-half Aarey Milk Colony, which is spread over 1,300 hectares.
To make up for this loss, the Urban Development Department of Maharashtra has been aggressively promoting the Miyawaki technique for creating dense green patches in one year.
Pioneered in the 1970s by botanist and plant ecologist Akira Miyawaki of Yokohama National University in Japan, the micro forestation model seeks to expand the green cover by nurturing mostly indigenous species of plants in small patches. A Miyawaki model forest can attain growth within five to ten years, whereas a natural forest takes 25 to 30 years to gain the same level of growth.
In the last three years, the BMC has promoted the method to create small “urban forests” in the city. In fact, one of the last decisions of former CM UddhavThackeray was to grow Miyawaki forests in 65 plots across Mumbai. He wanted all municipal corporations to emulate the BMC. The state also has the concept of 'heritage trees' which are above 50-years old.
Indian flowering trees
The BMC is also focusing on flowering trees native to India after the tree census revealed that exotic, non-native species planted for ornamental purposes account for half of Mumbai’s tree diversity of 318 species.
The recent Thane tree census reveals that native Indian trees in Thane are decreasing not only by species but also in numbers. Only 42 % of the 271 species in Thane are native to India. Likewise, in Nagpur, 91 of the 300 species are non-native.
However, Mumbai has a long way to go. The BMC’s Environment Status Report, 2017-‘18, shows that the city has one tree for every four people, way short of the eight trees per person recommended by a study of the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru.
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