CHENNAI: Three to five feet tall palm trees will stand guard for the city’s about 25-km coastline to reduce the impact of natural calamities and soil erosion, if the Greater Chennai Corporation’s plans fructify.
The Corporation Council passed a resolution on Friday for the initiative that the civic body plans to take in collaboration with the Tamil Nadu Agricultural University, Coimbatore. Officials privy to the proposal said the plans were to plant trees only in coastal areas where there would be less disruption to civic life. “In the first phase, we plan to plant 2,000 trees from the Light House to Pattinapakkam along the inner side of the loop road,” said an official.
He added that no decision had been made regarding the next phase of implementation. The reason behind the initiative is the ability of palm trees to withstand the onslaught of storms and heavy wind, reducing the force of winds in the process. “They will also protect soil from erosion by water and wind,” the official said.
According to a statement from the Corporation, the palm trees that have already grown to a height of 3-5 feet would be transplanted to the coastline with a distance of around 3 metres between them.
Transplantation is possible for several species of palm trees because of their small, grass-like roots clustered unlike the woody nature of roots of broad-leaved trees. However, experts caution that officials should tread cautiously while transplanting the trees as they may experience ‘transplantation shock’ causing the roots to harden due to exposure to sunlight, air or other forms of damage.
R Ramasubramanian, Principal Scientist at MS Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF), said transplantation could have been done away with. “The nuts can directly be planted along the coastline. After the 1964 cyclone that almost destroyed Dhanushkodi, the Forest Department planted nuts and the trees are doing reasonably well. When you uproot a tree and plant it elsewhere, the tree on the original site is lost,” he said.
However, while the Corporation plans to plant trees that have grown to a height of 3 metres, if planted as nuts, the trees would take 5-6 years to reach the same height, he added. “But palm trees do quite well in a saline environment where they can survive the fresh water in the sand without taking in the underlying saline water,” he said.
S Aroumougame, medicinal plant conservationist, was of the opinion that other types of vegetation should go together with these palm trees to achieve a certain level of impact mitigation. “In Parangipettai, immediately after the tsunami, the palm trees had wilted away,” said Aroumougame, who undertook a survey on the impact of the tsunami on vegetation immediately after the disaster.
He said that while palm trees could be grown intermittently, they should be accompanied by vegetation like Meswak (salvadora persica) or Indian oak (barringtonia acutangula) at a distance of 100-200 mts from the high tide line to achieve the desired effect.