Wish to know how much carbon dioxide is absorbed by the big trees at Pune’s? Empress Garden This project will soon tell you

Empress Garden is collaborating with The Green Concept, a company based in Pune and Berlin – comprising environmental scientists, ecologists, botanists and data scientists – that specialises in applied ecology, carbon assessments and ecosystem restoration. The project will estimate the amount of carbon dioxide being removed by the trees at the garden.

“The project started in January and we have been identifying species of the trees. According to previous estimates, there are around 1,700 trees in the garden. We are considering only big, grown trees that have a girth of more than 30 cm. There are many more shrubs and grasses in the garden but they are, right now, not our focus. Measuring certain parameters of the trees would, with the help of an app developed by The Green Concept, allow the calculation of carbon sequestration. We are collecting the data right now,” says Dr Dhanashree Paranjpe, programme director at the Rupa Rahul Bajaj Centre for Environment & Art (RRBCEA) which is housed at Empress Garden.

“Our primary objective is to implement research-based solutions for creating climate-resilient landscapes and bolstering ecological resilience through data-driven and observational decision-making,” says Dr Rohan Shetti, founder.

So far, measurements for around 700 trees have been completed. “Our target is such that, in the next couple of months, at least 95 per cent of the trees would be measured in the garden. We are really proud that this is one of the first projects in India where a 39-acre park is getting the whole carbon sequestration estimate done. It is going to help us not just get a sense of what is the diversity or how this is the green space, but actually put scientific numbers to it,” says Dr Paranjpe.

The data will be available on an interactive dashboard where “one can click on a particular tree and find out not only its height and girth but also its location in the garden and the amount of carbon it has sequestered.”

“It will show you this information and also tell you what it translates into in your day-to-day life. For instance, if one tree sequestered a certain amount of carbon dioxide…it is equivalent to driving so-and-so distance in a particular car. These sort of comparisons that generally anybody can understand are important because, otherwise, the numbers just remain numbers and people who are not familiar with the concept don’t get what it really means,” Dr Paranjpe says.

“The dashboard is really going to help people understand how much carbon dioxide is being offset because of the green trees that have been standing here for so many years,” she adds.

As this exercise requires some training and knowledge, the staff and a few college students who are interning are involved. “We visit each tree with tags that have QR codes provided by The Green Concept and fix one tag to each tree. Then we basically measure the tree’s height, girth and, if possible, the canopy diameter. We note down all these things so that they can be directly entered into the app along with identification of the tree according to its species,” Dr Paranjpe explains.

“There are many trees that are difficult to identify as they don’t belong to this region but are native to some other part of India or the world. So, we are trying to identify all the trees and also these major parameters,” she says.