Smart cities and green cover: Alien to each other?

Mangaluru: In the race to beautify our cities, our planners tend to overlook the role that the green canopy and lung spaces can do to the city’s beauty and its ambient air quality. But hope is out there at least from the coastal emerald city of Mangaluru in the form of a group of dedicated youngsters led by one of the top botanists of the country Dr. Smitha Hegde. They have taken up a project to map the tree population in the Mangaluru city.

“We call it street tree audit. This will help the city dwellers to overcome plant blindness - it is a term that us used in a condition when the people cannot identify a tree by the look of it, the street tree audit will bring up the level of awarness among the city dwellers and if all goes as planned the team will have a draft by the World Environment Day on June 5” Dr. Smitha Hegde deputy director of the Nitte University Center for Science Education and Research (NUCSER) told Hans India.

It is no exaggeration anymore that the air quality in our cities are getting bad and only the trees can mitigate the effects of Carbon. Our cities in the race for becoming smart, are losing sight of the environmental aspect and bio diversity traits. According to the Karnataka State Pollution Control Board, ideally a city must have 33 per cent green cover but we find there only 18 per cent green cover in Mangaluru city corporation area which is appalling in terms of the health of the city. “It is okay to have good streets, wide and traffic fiendly, but what makes us oblivious of the environmental needs of the city?” Dr. Smitha asks.

One of her researchers has even developed a mobile app that will help citizens to identify the tree by its look and not by a QR code. Young researcher Ratan in a research paper he produced has stated that urban areas are responsible for 70 per cent of carbon emissions and also a root cause for the poor AQI value and increase in the temperature. This can be controlled and reduced by trees since they can accumulate the atmospheric carbon and fix them.

The concept of tree audit comes into picture when citizens do not think beyond their lifestyles and by practicing little things that they think are good for environment, but that is not good enough, the tree audit will not only create awareness about the trees that grow in their cityscape they live in and also let them know what that tree can do to improve the air quality in their city. To say that we have enough trees to counter the carbon emissions, we need strong data to prove our claims. So, the initiative of tree audit keeps in mind the concepts of carbon emission, carbon footprint, tree-to-people ratio, and carbon sequestration.

“So the plan is to count and measure and identify individual trees in and around Mangalore city and map them, along with this the carbon sequestration is calculated using non-destructive allomeric formulas that give us the carbon that is sequestered by individual trees which can be clubbed to find the total carbon sequestered by the trees of Mangalore in a year, this when compared with the carbon emission data we can come to know how far or ahead we are when it comes to being carbon neutral or carbon positive.” Ratan says.