Can Miyawaki Forests Store More Carbon?
The Miyawaki method won’t save the planet, but it does have a lot of benefits for the local environment, ecology, and perhaps most importantly, the local community.
Maybe the re-establishing of nature can cause a mini butterfly effect, particularly with the joy it reignites within children, the rewilders of tomorrow!
The Miyawaki method does (within it) provide the potential for maximising CO2 capture: a topic very much of the moment.
All trees take CO2 from the atmosphere but efficiency and amounts vary massively. Mono plantations planted on poor soil (lacking their symbiotic fungal connections), capture a small percentage of what a dense area of native forest can. Through creating native pocket forests using the Miyawaki method the young forest ecosystem is set up for CO2 capture that fuels tree growth, soil health, and ecosystem development.
“Nothing in healthy ecosystems is static. It is always an unseen magical world of sharing, cycling, and balancing.”
James Godfrey-Faussett
Can Miyawaki Forests store more carbon?
A dense, diverse canopy of native species maximizes carbon capture, mainly due to the vast area of canopy that is able to photosynthesize. But it is also the soil fertility that controls photosynthesis. Biologically active soil is needed to make available minerals and elements to help fuel the numerous steps of photosynthesis. If the correct minerals aren’t available, the trees struggle. But if they are made available, photosynthesis can dramatically increase and capture CO2.
Soil CO2 sequestration is only the carbon left over and stored after carbon cycling — where the active carbon is used as fuel by microbes and fungi. We need fertile living soil to cycle carbon constantly rather than it just being sat there, this way more is used and nature’s fertility and life forces flow.
Even CO2 released by microbes during respiration can be re-used by the trees and the cycle continues.
