India has broken its own world record by planting 66 million trees in just 12 hours. According to India’s Government official, this is an act to honour a pledge made at the Paris Climate Change Conference. What’s the goal of this mass-planting event? To was to raise awareness for the nation’s plan to “make India green again”.
More than 1.5 million volunteers turned out and get involved in a huge plantation campaign organised on a Sunday in Uttar Pradesh, in the North of India.
The campaign was organised by the Madhya Pradesh government, taking in 24 districts of the Narmada river. Volunteers planted more than 20 different species of trees. Overall more than 66 million trees in just 12 hours, which is a record-breaking environmental success. Children and the elderly were part of this initiative.
India plants 66 million trees in 12 hours as part of record-breaking environmental campaign #planttrees #forests #reforestation #climatecrisis ?? https://t.co/GfRmgjKxei
— Ourgoodbrands (@ourgoodbrands) June 1, 2019
Shivraj Singh Chouhan, the state’s chief minister, described the efforts as a “historic day”. Indeed.
India’s previous world record was 49.3 million saplings in 24 hours planted, also in Uttar Pradesh.
Truth is, that India committed under the Paris Agreement to increasing its forests by five million hectares before 2030 to combat climate change. India is the world’s third largest generator of carbon emissions, however, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has reaffirmed his country’s commitment to the climate accord.
In fact, at the Paris climate conference, India pledged to increase forest cover to 95 million hectares (235 million acres) by the year 2030 and is putting $6.2 billion towards the effort.
Looking at data from the United Nations, deforestation and forest degradation make up 17 per cent of the world’s carbon emissions.
The planet loses 15 billion trees every year and much of it is cleared for farmland to feed the world’s booming population. By planting trees we are not only serving the town of Madhya Pradesh in the North of India but the world at large.
NASA has recently reported that Earth is much greener than 20 years ago
Surprisingly, countries that are leading the reforestation of the planet are India and China. NASA has released some pictures that show from the sky the shape of both countries in fully green.
Why are China and India doing these efforts? Because they are also the most polluting countries and trees are essential to clean CO2.
In the ’90s China kickstarted its tree-planting mobilizations to combat erosion, climate change, and air pollution. This dedicated planting — sometimes done by soldiers — equated to over 40% of China’s greening, so far.
This doesn’t mean we have a climate crisis solved, and so we still must deal with pollution and environmental destruction that larger corporations are causing to our beautiful planet. But at least this gives us some hope that we are now in the right direction.
Other nations are also undertaking massive tree-planting efforts to reduce deforestation and climate change. For example, in Australia, a team of engineers plan to use drones to plant 1 billion trees every year.
How can you contribute? Well, it’s as easy as installing the new search engine Ecosia so that in every search you can plant a tree!
Have you tried Ecosia before? Let us know in the comments below!
can you share the organization contact behind this project so we could communicate with to learn from them to conduct similar campaign in our country