Do Miyawaki Forests Help In Ecological Restoration ?

Do Miyawaki Forests Help In Ecological Restoration ?

They grow fast and easy but do Miyawaki forests meet the fundamental principles of ecological restoration?
Miyawaki Forests
These are urban forests which are grown by using the Miyawaki method. Such forests can be grown in small patches in urban areas or even in backyard, and typically make use of native or local seeds and saplings.
These forests grow quickly in small areas and consist of densely packed trees and shrubs, ideal for cluttered urban landscapes.

The plants and trees grow upwards towards the sunlight and the biodiverse forest also attracts fauna like butterflies and bees that are beneficial for the ecosystem.

This micro forest adopts the technique of a Japanese botanist, Akira Miyawaki, who, in the 1970s, began to plant young native plant species — trees, shrubs, and grasses — in tight groves to restore degraded lands.
Saplings planted close together grow rapidly as they compete for light.

By planting a native tree assortment, replicating the vegetation layers found in a mature forest, Miyawaki was engineering (and fast-forwarding) the stages of ecological succession by which a degraded plot turns naturally into a forest.

In his lifetime, Miyawaki is said to have monitored the planting of over 1,500 forests, from Japan to Southeast Asia, Brazil and India.

Miyawaki Forests in India
There are hundreds of thousands of Miyawaki forest trees in India, from Thiruvananthapuram to New Delhi.
Chennai’s municipal body promised to set up 1,000 mini-forests across the city, and the country’s largest Miyawaki forest is in Hyderabad planted across 10 acres.
These forests have sprung up in smaller urban centres, in the schools of Tirunelvelli, around temples in Tiruchi and even around a prison in Rohtak.

Global Boom
These fast-shooting micro forests, say advocates of the method, could cool concrete cities, clean the air, sustain wildlife, and form carbon sinks.
The method is quickly finding favour in government corridors and corporate boardrooms to restore urban spaces. But the theory, critics say, far outstrips the evidence in India.
They argue that the method is expensive, its benefits unclear, and Miyawaki’s techniques violate fundamental principles of ecological restoration.

 

In 2011, the Bonn Challenge set out to restore 350 million hectares by 2030. In 2020, the World Economic Forum launched the One Trillion Trees Initiative inspired by a highly criticised study in Science the previous year, which said that the “most effective climate change solution to date” was reforesting.
Done right, tree planting can have massive benefits. They store earth-warming carbon dioxide, sustain wildlife, improve the health of ecosystems, and provide employment.

But sticking the wrong trees in the wrong soils, or in soils that have never supported forests before is harmful: It reduces biodiversity, drives species to extinction, and hampers ecosystem resilience.
As Miyawaki projects have skyrocketed in Chennai, R.J. Ranjit Daniels, an ecologist and trustee of the Care Earth Trust, has watched the city’s open landscapes being clogged with micro-plantations that, he says, have disregarded the structure and composition of plants, neglected native species, and the region’s natural ecology.

Biodiversity impact

Tree-planting organisations untrained in the method are tarnishing Miyawaki’s reputation.
The majority of groups don’t conduct surveys to find out what the native species of the landscape are. They plant whatever they find.

Even when done right, there have been no assessments to compare the biodiversity and ecosystem impacts of Miyawaki forests with corresponding plots restored through other methods in India.
Researchers from the Wageningen University in the Netherlands have found that Miyawaki forests in the country support greater biodiversity than those in nearby non-Miyawaki forests. But comparative research of this kind has not been carried out in India.
Miyawaki trees absorb 30 times more carbon than monoculture plantations, advocates routinely claim. Yet carbon sequestration data from the Netherlands found carbon absorption benefits of Miyawaki forests appear to be on par with other forms of native reforestation.
The Miyawaki forests are not a kind of forest that you see in nature, It’s a very artificial forest.
Miyawaki forests are not intended to, and will never replicate natural forests, but it is a technique to restore biodiversity and fight climate change impacts in cities.
This method allows to create mini-forests in a very small area.

Unconventional methods
In the original Miyawaki method, for example, saplings were traditionally planted on mud mounds, created by digging up the nutrient-rich top-soil from another ecosystem, earth that was previously rich in micro-organisms and fungal-tree networks specific to that area.

A 2018 study by Care Earth Trust on the green cover of Chennai revealed that 15% of the area in Greater Chennai Corporation is under vegetation cover.
Every rapidly urbanising city has space constraints, but this does not mean the only feasible form of afforestation needs to involve choking small spaces with a large number of trees and shrubs.
Naturally growing trees are also important as habitats for urban fauna. When left undisturbed for 5-10 years, they support biological communities and form near-natural local ecosystems. And for performing these ‘ecosystem services’, they can also be more profitable than a Miyawaki forest...