DNCC begins Miyawaki urban forest planting at Diabari in Uttara, Dhaka

Dhaka North City Corporation (DNCC) began work on 18 May 2026 on what it described as the country's largest urban forestation project, planting saplings by the Japanese Miyawaki method on a green belt at Diabari in Uttara. The corporation said the project was its response to the air, water and soil pollution of Dhaka and was meant to help restore the environmental balance of the city.

DNCC administrator Md Shafiqul Islam Khan opened the work by planting trees on the afternoon of Monday, 18 May, at a site marked as a green belt on the eastern side of Lake No. 11, next to Bridge No. 4 at Uttara Diabari, Jagonews24 and Prothom Alo reported that day.

The site was not new to planting. According to DNCC, 14,000 trees had already been planted there in phase one, which covered the first 150 metres of the strip (chainage zero to 150 metres), between 26 November 2025 and 15 January 2026. The corporation described that phase as successfully completed.

Phases two and three, which began on 18 May, were to add about 39,400 trees over about 2.60 acres. Prothom Alo reported that DNCC planned to finish this planting by December. The planting list covered about 250 species: native fruit trees, flowering trees, medicinal plants, timber species, ornamental plants, conifers, shrubs and bushes.

In his welcome speech, superintending engineer Abul Kashem said the new forest would play a significant role in controlling pollution in Dhaka, and that more than 39,000 trees were being planted at the site as part of the corporation's plan to plant five lakh trees in five years. Additional chief engineer Abul Hasnat Mohammad Ashraful Alam presided over the event.

The administrator said DNCC was pursuing the project to build long-term green infrastructure that would improve the city's air quality, protect biodiversity and support the health of residents. Everyone knows the benefits of trees, he said, but in city life there are very few initiatives where their real effect can be felt, and he would give this project top priority. He said he had felt a sense of mental relief at the site, and that an environment of this kind would have a positive effect on the physical and mental health of the city's people.

DNCC said the forest follows the principles of biophilic design and biomimicry. The ground has been shaped into raised and low mounds, with winding paths through the planting and a walkway along the lakeshore.

Biophilic design is an approach in architecture and planning that tries to increase people's contact with nature, and with nature-like forms, for the sake of their health and well-being. The root word, biophilia, was used by the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm in 1973 and was developed by the American biologist Edward O. Wilson in his 1984 book Biophilia, where he defined it as "the innate tendency to focus on life and lifelike processes". Biomimicry, also called biomimetics, means copying the models, systems and elements of nature to solve human problems. In tree planting, the Miyawaki method expresses the same idea: Akira Miyawaki wrote that seedlings should be mixed and planted closely together "following the system of natural forests", rather than as the single-species plantations grown for lumber, which he criticised.

The soil has been specially prepared. Loam has been mixed with vermicompost, coco dust (the dust left from coconut husk fibre), rice husk, bone meal and organic fertiliser to create conditions suited to a forest. This follows the core of Miyawaki's own instructions. In a 1999 review in the Japanese journal Plant Biotechnology, he wrote that on land where the topsoil had been lost, 20 to 30 centimetres of topsoil should be recovered by mixing the soil of the region with organic materials such as fallen leaves, compost and mown grass before any seedling is planted.

The paths through the dense planting are meant to give visitors the experience the Japanese call shinrin-yoku, or forest bathing: a slow walk among trees. What research in Japan has found about forest bathing is set out further below.

Several government, private and voluntary organisations are taking part. They include the Forest Department, Shakti Foundation, Green Savers, Green Voice, Brighters, Youth Foundation of Bangladesh, OAB Foundation and Jubo O Paribesh Unnayan Sangstha (Youth and Environment Development Organisation). A firm named Ediface is helping with the feasibility study and the survey for the Miyawaki forest.

The Forest Department is the government agency responsible for protecting and maintaining the forests and wildlife of Bangladesh, with its head office at Mohakhali in Dhaka. Originally set up to look after natural forests, it moved into social forestry, planting with and for local people, in the 1980s. Banglapedia, the national encyclopedia, records that in 1962-63 two forest extension divisions were created, one at Rajshahi and one at Dhaka, and that a tree planting day on 1 June was introduced at the same time; the campaign later grew from a day to a week, a month and then three months. The first large community forestry project, financed by the Asian Development Bank with technical help from the FAO, ran from 1982 to 1987 in seven districts and set out to establish about 4,800 kilometres of strip plantations along roads, railways and canal embankments.

Green Savers had already worked with the city corporation before this project: when DNCC launched its 2025 monsoon planting campaign, a tree care and rooftop garden support centre run through Green Savers was announced alongside it, Bangla Tribune reported in June 2025. Shakti Foundation for Disadvantaged Women is a Bangladeshi non-government organisation whose programmes include microfinance for women, health services and climate work.

Two academics sit on DNCC's task force for analysing air quality and deciding what should be done: Professor Dr Ahmad Kamruzzaman Majumder of Stamford University Bangladesh and Raufa Khanam of BRAC University. Stamford University Bangladesh is a private university in Dhaka established in 2002 under the Private University Act; BRAC University, also private, was founded in 2001 by Sir Fazle Hasan Abed as part of BRAC and is in Merul Badda, Dhaka. Technical support on the Miyawaki method, biophilic design and the landscape concept is being given by Arham Ul Haque Chowdhury.

DNCC said it had already sent the ministry an action plan to plant five lakh (500,000) trees over the next five years, as its part of the Prime Minister's announced programme to plant 25 crore (250 million) trees in five years. The first-year target was 50,000 trees by December 2026.

The national programme has its roots in the February 2026 election. The Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) unveiled its manifesto on 6 February 2026, and the planting of 250 million trees was listed among its commitments, alongside items such as a Family Card and a Farmer Card. The BNP, led by Tarique Rahman, won the general election held on 12 February 2026.

The Diabari forest was also not the corporation's first large planting drive. On 26 June 2025 DNCC launched a three-month monsoon campaign, with a stated aim of five lakh trees, to protect Dhaka's environment and reduce air pollution, Bangla Tribune reported. The campaign was formally opened at Hararbari square in Purbachal New Town, with Syeda Rizwana Hasan, then adviser to the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, as chief guest. The administrator at the time, Mohammad Ejaz, said the target for that monsoon was three to five lakh trees, to protect the city's environmental balance, cut air pollution and protect public health. The adviser warned that once a city's ecosystem is destroyed it is hard to restore, and that planting alone is not enough: trees need regular care and maintenance.

The same report said DNCC had planted about 77,000 trees in the 2023-24 fiscal year as part of its greening plan, and that it planned to plant native species along 120 kilometres of road medians and 108 kilometres of canal banks. That campaign named road medians, parks, playgrounds, canal banks, graveyards and low-income settlements as its planting sites. The Diabari forest is a different kind of planting: a dense block of many species meant to grow into a small forest.

The method is named after Akira Miyawaki, a Japanese botanist and plant ecologist, born on 29 January 1928, who died on 16 July 2021. He was professor emeritus of Yokohama National University and director of the Japanese Center for International Studies in Ecology, and he received the Blue Planet Prize in 2006. In the late 1950s he worked in Germany with the vegetation scientist Reinhold Tüxen on the idea of potential natural vegetation, which became the basis of his work.

Potential natural vegetation, as Miyawaki explained it in his 1999 review, is the vegetation a piece of land could hold if there were no human impact: a theoretical measure of what the land can sustain. To find it, ecologists study the natural vegetation that remains in an area and compare it with the secondary vegetation that has replaced it, and examine the soil profile, the topography and the use of the land.

Miyawaki took his model from a Japanese tradition. When villages and towns were built in Japan, he wrote, people usually kept forests of local trees around shrines and temples, called Chinju-no-mori. He treated these groves as remnants of the original forest and called his approach restoring "native forests by native trees". In his 1999 review he described the steps as follows.

• Survey the area's vegetation to find its potential natural vegetation and choose the main tree species from it.
• Collect seeds or acorns of those species and grow the seedlings in pots until their root systems are fully developed.
• Where the topsoil has been lost, recover 20 to 30 centimetres of it by mixing the soil of the region with organic material such as fallen leaves, compost and mown grass.
• Plant the potted seedlings of the main species mixed with as many companion species as possible, densely, following the system of natural forests; Miyawaki wrote that two or three seedlings per square metre is appropriate.
• Mulch with organic material such as rice straw to prevent soil erosion and loss of moisture.
• For two or three years, cut or pull the weeds and leave them around the young trees as further mulch; after about three years the trees cover the ground.

Miyawaki made strong claims for the method. He wrote that the green surface of a multi-layered forest of the potential natural vegetation is about thirty times that of a single-layered lawn, that such forests have a much larger capacity to absorb and store carbon dioxide than lawns, and that quasi-natural multi-layered forests could be built in 15 to 20 years in Japan and 40 to 50 years in Southeast Asia, against the several hundred years that natural succession would take. Encyclopedic accounts of his work give the classical estimate as 150 to 200 years for a young multi-layered native forest to restore itself on bare soil in Japan, and at least 300 years in the tropics of Southeast Asia.

Miyawaki's first large commission came in the early 1970s from Nippon Steel Corporation, which wanted forests on the embankments around its steelworks at Oita after earlier conventional plantations had died; the company later planted forests at several more of its mills. By 1999 Miyawaki reported that he and his colleagues had restored forests at about 550 locations in Japan, and he wrote that among them "we don't see a single failure".

Abroad, his 1999 review describes three projects in detail. In Malaysia, a joint project with Mitsubishi Corporation and the agricultural university of Malaysia began in 1990 on 800 hectares of barren land at the university's Bintulu campus in Sarawak, on Borneo; by 1999, 330,000 seedlings had been planted on 50 hectares, and six years after planting the trees had reached six to ten metres. In Brazil, near Belem in the Amazon, the first planting festival was held on 18 May 1992 with 92 species, and some trees reached ten to fifteen metres in five years. In China, the first planting along the Great Wall near Beijing took place on 4 July 1998 with about 1,400 volunteers from Japan and 1,200 from China, in a three-year programme planned for 390,000 seedlings.

Closer to Bangladesh, Pakistan opened what was described as the largest urban Miyawaki forest project in the world at Saggian in August 2021: 12.5 acres with more than 165,000 plants. Earlier that year, in January 2021, the Clifton Urban Forest was started as a private initiative on a coastal landfill site in Karachi, following Miyawaki's techniques. In India the method has been used since at least 2013, when it was applied in the Barapani industrial area of Umiam in the north-east, and later in Bengaluru, in government schools in Puducherry from December 2019, and elsewhere.

The method is not free of doubts. When it was first tested in a Mediterranean ecosystem, in Sardinia, Italy, in 2000, on land where traditional reforestation had failed, the results after two and eleven years were described as positive for plant diversity, yet between 61 and 84 per cent of the planted trees had died after twelve years, according to a study by Bartolomeo Schirone, Antonello Salis and Federico Vessella published in the journal Landscape and Ecological Engineering. Other critics point to the high cost of preparing the soil and planting so densely, and question how far a planted forest can stand in for one that has grown naturally.

In Bangladesh, Prothom Alo wrote in an editorial on 1 January 2025 about what it called the country's first Miyawaki forest, created through a private initiative in the Sonapahar area of Jorarganj union in Mirsarai, Chattogram, on land that had earlier been degraded by brick kilns. The newspaper said the forest, then 13 months old, held hundreds of plant species; Delowar Jahan of the Natural Agriculture Center had advised on it and Amjad Hosen had started it. The newspaper argued that naturalists and environmental experts wanted the model spread across the country using native species.

The pollution DNCC named as its reason is well documented. In the 2025 World Air Quality Report, published by the Swiss air quality company IQAir on 24 March 2026, Bangladesh was the second most polluted country in the world, with an annual average concentration of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) of 66.1 micrograms per cubic metre, just behind Pakistan at 67.3. The World Health Organization's guideline for the annual average is 5 micrograms per cubic metre. In IQAir's previous report, for 2024, Bangladesh had also ranked second, at 78.0 micrograms per cubic metre, behind Chad.

The WHO's fact sheet on ambient air quality, updated on 24 October 2024, estimated that outdoor air pollution caused 4.2 million premature deaths worldwide in 2019, and that in 2019 about 99 per cent of the world's people lived in places where the WHO guideline levels were not met. It also noted that 89 per cent of those premature deaths were in low- and middle-income countries.

Banglapedia describes Dhaka as the place in Bangladesh where the problem is most acute. It names two main sources, industrial and vehicle emissions, with brick kilns among the industrial sources, and notes that air pollution in Dhaka is usually at its worst in the dry months from December to March.

The term shinrin-yoku, "taking in the forest atmosphere", was coined by Japan's Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries in 1982. In a paper published in January 2010 in the journal Environmental Health and Preventive Medicine, researchers led by B. J. Park of Chiba University reported field experiments in 24 forests across Japan with 280 young adults, each of whom walked in and looked at a forest on one day and a city area on the other. In the forest, they measured lower concentrations of the stress hormone cortisol, lower pulse rate, lower blood pressure and greater parasympathetic nerve activity, which is associated with rest, than in the city.

In the same issue, Qing Li of Nippon Medical School in Tokyo reviewed a series of studies begun in 2005 in which adults went on three-day, two-night trips to forest areas. The activity and number of natural killer cells, a part of the immune system, were significantly higher on forest days than on ordinary working days, and the raised activity lasted for more than 30 days after the trip; a tourist visit to a city did not have this effect. These studies were made in established forests in Japan, not in young urban plantings, and they do not measure what a planted forest beside a lake in Dhaka will do for its visitors.

Dhaka North City Corporation was established on 29 November 2011, when the former Dhaka City Corporation was dissolved and split into north and south corporations. In 2016 the government added eight unions to its area, which grew to 197 square kilometres. It is divided into 54 wards, and the 2022 census counted 5,990,723 people in its jurisdiction.

Uttara, in the north of the corporation, began as a planned satellite town. In 1965 the Dhaka Improvement Trust, today's RAJUK (Rajdhani Unnayan Kartripakkha), surveyed the Azampur and Faydabad area between Tongi and the Kurmitola airport for a new town, and the foundation stone was laid on 25 June 1967. The project was renamed Uttara Residential Model Town in 1980. Its third phase was announced in 1999 and finalised in 2009: a westward expansion by four more sectors over 2,008 acres, meant to house 500,000 people.

Diabari covers the open, low-lying land of Sectors 15 and 16 of Uttara. Trains on Dhaka's metro rail Line 6 start their journey from the Diabari area, and Uttara came onto the metro network in 2022. Before this planting, Diabari was already a place that Dhaka residents visited for its open, rural surroundings inside the city: its canal, its birds, boating and kayaking, and the white kans grass that people come to see.

Photo: G. Hameed / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Sources: Jagonews24, Prothom Alo, Bangla Tribune, Plant Biotechnology (Akira Miyawaki, 1999), Environmental Health and Preventive Medicine (Park et al., 2010; Li, 2010), Landscape and Ecological Engineering (Schirone et al.), IQAir, World Health Organization, Banglapedia, Wikipedia