For the 550th birth anniversary of Guru Nanak Dev Ji in 2019, EcoSikh, an environmental organisation working within the Sikh community, began planting small dense native forests on the Miyawaki model, calling them Guru Nanak Sacred Forests.
Each is a patch of a few hundred to a few thousand square metres, planted with dozens of native species at high density on land given by a village panchayat or a gurdwara, and left to grow without irrigation after the first few years.
Several hundred have been planted across Punjab and in other states and countries.
The method is not a substitute for forest and the patches are small. What they do is put native species back into a landscape that has almost none, on land nobody was using, at negligible cost, with village labour.
It is the only tree planting effort in Punjab in decades that has produced visible surviving plantations at scale, as against the annual departmental planting figures.
A religious anniversary produced more tree cover in Punjab than any environmental policy has.
The Guru Nanak sacred forest programme plants dense native woodlots on small parcels of land attached to gurdwaras, schools and panchayats, using close spacing to establish canopy fast.
Several hundred have been planted across Punjab and abroad since 2019. Each is small and the aggregate is the largest planting of native species the state has seen in decades.
The state's own afforestation is largely eucalyptus and poplar on farm boundaries, which is timber rather than habitat. The difference between the two approaches is the whole argument.