Liberty Market Urban Forest — Miyawaki Micro-Forest on a Lahore Traffic Island

Lahore lost roughly 75% of its urban tree cover over three decades and recorded among the world's worst winter air-pollution levels in 2019, prompting a search for fast, low-cost ways to green degraded urban land.
In a public-private partnership between the Lahore Development Authority and social enterprise Restore Green, funded by Izhar-Monnoo Developers, a one-acre traffic-island site at Liberty Market, Gulberg was converted in December 2019 into a Miyawaki-method micro-forest: over 10,000 saplings of 52 native species — including neem, sukhchain, shahtoot, peepal, mango, pomegranate, guava, pomelo and lemon — were planted at three saplings per square metre, chosen through a potential-natural-vegetation survey led by Restore Green founder Bilal Chaudri.
Two years on, more than 95% of the saplings had survived, growing from roughly three feet at planting to twenty to twenty-five feet. Observed biodiversity included fungi, Asian ladybugs, bees, butterflies and lesser goldenbacked woodpeckers, and a comparable Restore Green Miyawaki plot measured about 10°C of local cooling relative to surrounding paved surfaces. The approach was subsequently replicated nationally — Pakistan's Ministry of Climate Change later reported 126 Miyawaki urban-forest plots across the country, 51 of them in Lahore.
Independent commentary (Dawn's 'Karachi's dead-end urban greening') cautions that many of Pakistan's Miyawaki plots lack dedicated municipal maintenance budgets once initial NGO or developer funding ends, so durability beyond the first two to three years has not yet been independently verified at scale.

Read the full analysis: https://www.naturebasedsolutionsinitiative.org/news/liberty-market-forest-an-urban-forest-in-pakistan/