🇱🇧🌳💧⚒️ Join us in raising $5,000 to water and care for Beirut’s pocket forests and the communities that sustain them.
Air pollution in Beirut has surged dramatically due to war-related emissions, severely impacting air quality across the city. This affects everyone, especially children, the elderly, and those with respiratory conditions.
Beirut’s pocket forests are small, living ecosystems growing in places once forgotten. Planted densely with native species using the Miyawaki Method, they help clean the air, cool surrounding neighborhoods, support biodiversity, and create spaces for community and healing.
In May 2019, SUGi planted its first pocket forest along the Beirut river in partnership with theOtherDada. What began as one forest has grown into a network of 22 forest sites across the city.
Through revolutions, economic crisis, war, and uncertainty, the local community and theOtherDada team have continued to protect and nurture these spaces.
Today, rising fuel prices and water costs threaten the survival of the youngest forests. These ecosystems need consistent watering and maintenance during their early years to become resilient and self-sustaining.
We are raising $5,000 to support:
• 6 month watering
• Tools, mulch, and replacement plants
• Community programming
• Forest Maker Team
All funds go directly to the forests and the people who maintain them.
Caring for what already exists is one of the most powerful forms of climate action.
We recognize that in times of war and humanitarian crisis, needs are urgent and immediate. We encourage supporting humanitarian relief efforts alongside long-term community resilience projects like these forests, because both matter.
Help us keep Beirut growing.
#SUGi #Beirut #PocketForest #ClimateAction #Rewilding
🇬🇧Join us for a BioBlitz and maintenance session at Festival of Nature in Bristol @festofnature
📆 Thursday 11th June 2026
📍Bristol — Natura Nostra Forest, Clarence Road, Bristol, UK
⏱️ 11:00 - 14:00
🌳Register Now (Link in our bio)
Roll up your sleeves. It’s time to give the forest a little tender loving hand. Join us as we care for the forest to help native plants thrive.
Led by SUGi UK Forest Lead, Adrian Wong, we’ll measure how the Bristol pocket forest supports local biodiversity.
Whether you’re a seasoned naturalist or simply curious about rewilding in action, we’d love for you to join us.
We’ll be using iNaturalist during the session to record our findings. Please take a moment to download the app and set up an account beforehand so we can dive right in.
This event is part of The Festival of Nature 2026, across Bristol, Bath and online, a week-long schedule of events with over 160 talks, workshops, guided walks, wellbeing and learning experiences, performances and more.
Support Nature-based Solutions that build biodiversity, climate resilience and wellbeing in cities. 🌿Link in our bio 👆
#SUGi #PocketForest #Biodiversity #Cities #Plant
Did you know the Taj Mahal used you be surrounded in forest gardens?
Taj Mahal is one of the most revered and admired monuments in the world. It’s a symbol of love, religion and culture. But its history is much more complex than just that. The Taj Mahal gardens can tell the political and cultural story of India throughout the years.
It was built between 1632 and 1653 by Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan in memory of his wife Mumtaz Mahal.
An important part of the monument are the gardens. They embody the essence of Mughal garden design and follow the Charbagh layout: a style of gardens that developed during the Mughal Empire in the Indian subcontinent.
Charbagh garden can be directly translated as the “four gardens” and its concept is reflected in the Taj Mahal gardens’ symmetrical and geometric arrangement, dividing the space into four quadrants through intersecting water channels and filled with native plant species.
Over the centuries since the Taj Mahal was built, India has undergone multiple changes politically and it can be seen in the gardens of Taj Mahal and more specifically its diversity. The most drastic and noteworthy one took place once the British colonised India, for the Taj Mahal restoration that took place between 1899 to 1905.
The restoration rejuvenated the monument, but it brought upon changes that affected the biodiversity of the gardens. One of those changes was the introduction of certain European and British horticultural practices and non-native plant species that replaced some of the native plantings.
Their focus was also more on ornamental flowers and fruit trees that were considered economically productive plants. The British preferred a more manicured landscape and one of the changes made was the removal of some large trees from the Taj Mahal. There is a stark difference in the vegetation that can be found now compared to centuries ago.
Support Nature-based Solutions that build biodiversity, climate resilience and wellbeing in cities. 🌿Link in our bio 👆 #biodiversity #nature #TajMahal #India #rewild
What if insects in your city weren’t background life, but essential workers shaping how the city functions?
The ones we overlook. The ones we avoid. The ones quietly holding ecosystems together. Not incidental, just unseen. Pollinating plants. Breaking down waste. Sustaining soil and growth in ways we rarely acknowledge.
We’ve been taught to think of cities as human systems. But they have always been more-than-human. Cities are shared environments, shaped by countless nonhuman lives working alongside us.
Insects already operate through complex systems of cooperation and division of labor, each playing a role in sustaining the whole. And in urban environments, they continue that work. Supporting biodiversity. Recycling nutrients. Keeping natural cycles intact within human infrastructure.
But our cities are rarely designed with them in mind.
Urban planning tends to prioritize human function, often overlooking the ecological workers that make these spaces livable in the first place. And still, so much remains unseen: how insects move through buildings and green spaces, how they adapt to materials, how they quietly reshape the environments we build. What if we stopped seeing insects as intruders, and started seeing them as participants? Not just surviving in cities, but helping sustain them.
Because the future of urban life may depend on designing with them, not against them.
Support Nature-based Solutions that build biodiversity, climate resilience, and wellbeing in cities. 🌿 Link in our bio 👆
#SUGi #PocketForest #Biodiversity #Cities #Insects
Just 3 years ago, this was dry, lifeless grass. Today, it is a growing temperate rainforest, shaped not just by climate, but by people.
That transformation began with people. Neighbours, families, children and library staff came together to plant each sapling by hand, turning shared effort into lasting change.
The canopy is thickening, creating cooler air and holding moisture in the soil below.
Here, education doesn’t stop at the library door. It continues outside, in the shade of trees, in the soil, in the rhythms of a regenerating ecosystem.
Children learn biodiversity by seeing it. Adults reconnect with nature simply by spending time in it. The forest becomes both teacher and classroom.
In a deprived area of Frutillar, the forest has become a living classroom and a shared refuge. A place where education, care and nature meet.
Together with the community, this forest is doing what forests do best.
Healing. Teaching. Rewilding.
Support Nature-based Solutions that build biodiversity, climate resilience, and wellbeing in cities. 🌿 Link in our bio 👆
Forest Partner: Daughter For Earth @daughtersforearth
SUGi Forest Marker: Bosko Chile @bosko.cl
Thank you to: @biblioteca.frutillar@fundacion_mapa_
#SUGi #PocketForest #Biodiversity #Cities #Chile
Advice from a tree.
Stand tall and proud.
Sink your roots into the earth.
Be content with your natural beauty.
Go out on a limb.
Drink plenty of water.
Remember your roots.
Enjoy the view.
Poem by: Ilan Shamir
Support Nature-based Solutions that build biodiversity, climate resilience, and wellbeing in cities. 🌿 Link in our bio 👆
#SUGi #PocketForest #Biodiversity #Cities
From mycorrhizal networks trading nutrients beneath forest floors to lichens that live as neither fungus nor algae but both, life has always thrived through relationship, not in spite of others, but because of them.
Nature isn’t a marketplace of competition; it’s an economy of exchange. Every organism gives and receives, entangled in a web of reciprocity that stretches back billions of years. What if love isn’t just a human feeling, but the organizing principle of life itself?
The ancients had a name for this binding agent that orders the cosmos. They called it Eros, love. “From an ecological perspective, love is a practice of balancing interests that leads to a state of greater aliveness,” writes biologist Andreas Weber in Matter and Desire: An Erotic Ecology. “We can understand all processes in the biosphere as processes of relationship.”
Every SUGi Pocket Forest is an act of participation in this economy. Densely planted native species, roots entwining, canopies sharing light, soil life feeding soil life, become communities of mutual flourishing. Rewilding isn’t just restoration; it’s rejoining a conversation we were never meant to leave.We are not separate from nature.
We are nature, learning to love itself back into balance.
Support Nature-based Solutions that build biodiversity, climate resilience, and wellbeing in cities. 🌿 Link in our bio 👆
#SUGi #PocketForest #Biodiversity #Cities
🇦🇺 Sydney is getting its first SUGi Pocket Forest 🌿💚
In Western Sydney’s red soils, something is taking root. A forest born from curiosity, data, and the determination of young people who looked at their overheating school and decided to take action.
The story began with students. Sixty ‘Grade 10’ young people stepped outside their classrooms armed with thermal sensors, measuring temperatures across 8 locations on their school grounds over summer to understand how heat was building through their campus. What they found, they did not keep to themselves. They pitched a five-year plan to their principal to make their campus climate resilient. This forest is their vision, which will take root.
Spanning 400sq m, the design brings together a dense Miyawaki forest with a dedicated pollinator and grass habitat along one edge. Inspired by the native Cumberland Plain Woodland, it reflects the true structure of this ecosystem, where grasses and groundcovers are essential, but not part of the forest core. By creating space for both, the project supports richer biodiversity and mirrors the balance of the natural system.
Support Nature-based Solutions that build biodiversity, climate resilience, and wellbeing in cities. 🌿 Link in our bio 👆
Forest Partner: R&Co4Generations
SUGi Forest Marker: Dr Grey Coupland @miyawakiforestwa
#SUGi #PocketForest #Biodiversity #Cities #Sydney
14 months at District Six Heritage Forest, Cape Town, South Africa
On the slopes of Table Mountain, a SUGi Pocket Forest is taking hold. Pioneer species like False Olive are already sheltering slower-growing afromontane natives, Yellowwood and Cape Holly, from the wind, giving them the cover they need to put down deep roots.
The canopy is thickening. Students are showing up to learn and play beneath it every week.
Together with the community, this forest is doing what forests do best. Restoring. Reconnecting. Rewilding.
Support Nature-based Solutions that build biodiversity, climate resilience, and wellbeing in cities. 🌿 Link in our bio 👆
SUGi Forest Marker: Aghmad Gamieldien
Photography: @christianhelgi & Yasser Booley
#SUGi #PocketForest #Biodiversity #Cities CapeTow
Pocket Forests Boost Body & Mind 💊🌿
New research led by the University of Oxford shows that small, wild, native pocket forests can meaningfully improve well-being, even in dense urban areas. In this robust pilot study, 75 participants sat for 30 minutes beside 3 SUGi Pocket Forests across London.
Key takeaways:
— Anxiety dropped significantly at all 3 pocket forests compared with nearby control sites
— At Southbank Forest, participants also showed lower heart rates, a sign of deeper calm
— High-quality wild spaces with native tree diversity delivered measurable mind-body benefits
Concrete cities need pockets of calm. Nature is not a luxury; it’s essential for human health.
Read the details of the pilot study on our blog.
Thank you all those who participated, this would not have been possible without you.
#SUGi #PocketForest #Biodiversity #Cities
SUGi x NAVA Contemporary: Celebrating 5 years of growing a network of pocket forests around the world.
Together, we launched a dedicated offering on Samsung Frame TV, transforming screens into a gallery for the forests, using the power of visual storytelling these works spotlight the beauty and importance of rewilding.
SUGi continues to empower people to invest in nature by planting pocket forests worldwide, while NAVA Contemporary curates and champions artists who inspire change.
Here’s to five years of collaboration and many more forests to come 🌍
Discover the partnership and explore the artworks. Link in bio.
#EarthDay #NAVA #sugi
