Fifty residents of the city, including members of Tree Walk, a citizens’ forum for conservation of tree wealth, have appealed to the executive director of the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) for a review of a decision to cut and remove trees from the C-DAC campus at Vellayambalam.
The appeal has been made in the wake of a C-DAC tender invitation regarding the same.
The appeal points out that removal of full-grown trees at the peak of summer would cause an increase in urban heat island effect on the campus. With warnings of rise in temperatures over the coming days, the role of green spaces such as C-DAC in mitigating the adverse effects of heat could not be ignored.
It calls for a scientific assessment of the ‘threat’ that the trees pose to the buildings on the campus, and suggests the name of the Kerala Forest Research Institute (KFRI) in Thrissur that has a special tree protocol procedure to give an accurate judgment about the status of a tree.
