Peepal (Ficus religiosa) tree doing extremely well next to Keekar shrub in Shahzad Qureshi’s urban forest. ─ Photo by author
In fact, if he had his way, he would convert all the parks and all open spaces in the port city of Karachi into urban forests.
Even if Karachi is able to grow 25 urban forests, he said, it would be able to get rid of terrible urban heat island (UHI) effect – an urban area that is significantly hotter than surrounding rural areas due to human activity.
Abbas explained the science behind UHI.
“Due to human interventions within an urban landscape, the landscape absorbs more and reflects less heat during the sunshine hours (aka the short wave radiation) and then at night, releases the additional heat back into the environment (aka the long wave radiation).”
As a consequence, he said, the urban area feels warmer than its surroundings both during the day and at night.
Even air quality can exacerbate the UHI effect, pointed out Abid Omar, who works with the Pakistan Air Quality Initiative (PAQI).
PAQI provides air quality data to inform citizens. According to Omar an increase in greenhouse gases raises the temperature by radiative forcing.
“Radiative forcing means that the energy that is normally reflected back to space stays trapped within the atmosphere by the accumulation of air pollution and greenhouse cases and causes the temperature to go up.”
To reduce the impact, he said, cities can plan “green zones” by increasing the number of parks and trees.
Another way, he said, was by creating “urban air corridors that help channel the flow of air through the city, bringing in fresh air from outside, and removing polluted air from within city centres”.
An air corridor means a continuous flow of air by means of green zones through the city.
“Like connecting parks in Karachi to Malir river or those in Lahore to the canals to create an air corridor,” explained Omar.
Qureshi was not always a green trooper. Three years ago all he was concerned with was that his newly opened spa, named “Raintree”, inside a high-end mall should give the “rainforest” effect.
“I bought beautiful fancy palms, had rivulets built and the place smelled as if you’d stepped inside a spa in Thailand,” he said, sheepishly.
The heatwave of June 2015 was the watershed moment for Qureshi, although a six-minute Ted Talk by founder and director of Afforestt, Bangalore-based Shubhendu Sharma in 2014, had sown the first seed.
Sharma’s company provides service for “creating natural, wild, maintenance free, native” forests.
“The heatwave just mobilised me into action,” said Qureshi.
He already had his eyes set on the park, which at that time was nothing more than a “garbage dumping ground”.
He went a few times to the Parks Department and his persistence convinced the director to give permission to use the park for his “experiment” but only if he did not ask them for any resources.
The Indian connection During this time, Qureshi was also holding continuous discussions with Bangalore-based Sharma.
When he finally got the land, Qureshi invited Sharma over to Pakistan and the latter helped him design this urban forest.
Shubendhu Sharma (left) and Shahzad Qureshi (right) discussing the design of the urban forest to be created in Karachi. ─ Photo by Urban Forest
Sharma, an industrial engineer, was inspired by the Japanese botanist Akira Miyawaki’s method of afforestation.
He met Miyawaki in 2008 in Bangalore, when he was working at Toyota. The Japanese forester had come to the site to plant a forest at the factory.
“We made a forest in our Toyota factory in June 2009,” he recalled. By 2011, Sharma had quit his job to go into creating forests.
Miyawaki’s technique makes the trees grow ten times faster than in nature, creating a self-sustaining forest within two to three years.
Afforestt has already created 113 forests in 38 cities in nine countries.
“We get photos from individuals from all across the world – Ireland, France, Kenya, Australia, France – showing fully matured forests.”
Recently they have been tasked with creating 100 urban woods in the Netherlands.
He says while a forest typically takes a hundred years to mature, the one he creates grows 10 times faster, is 30 times as dense and 100 times more biodiverse.
“The biggest lesson I learnt working as an engineer was documentation. Our strength has been our robust and updated documentation. We have also improved on our methodology as we learn more and delve into diverse geographic areas.”
In Rajasthan, which he said had “dead” soil, they introduced microorganisms artificially while creating a strip of forest there in 2016.
Sharma said that based on their Rajasthan experience they carried out newer interventions in Lahore in 2017.
“The forest there is growing much faster than the one in Karachi.”