july 30, 2019
Andrew Campbell
On July 5, 2017, 1.5 million people in India planted 66 million trees in 12 hours to help the country fight climate change. According to the Twitter of Dr. Getahun Mekuria, Minister for Innovation and Technology, Ethiopia planted a world record of 353,633,660 trees in 12 hours on July 29 to tackle climate crisis. The national tree-planting campaign was part of "Green Legacy", a forest restoration promoted by Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Dr. Abiy Ahmed Ali himself. Prime Minister Ahmed had tweeted to encourage his fellow citizens and aim Ethiopia's planting target at 4 billion trees in the rainy season from May to October.
Based on the latest United Nations estimates, Ethiopia has over 110 million inhabitants, ranked the 2nd-most populous nation on the African continent, with a total land of 1,100,000 square kilometers. The UK-based charitable organization Farm Africa, set up in 1985 to serve farmers, pastoralists and forest communities in eastern Africa, reported Ethiopia’s land had been deforested from 35% to less than 4% in the 20th century. Since 2017, Ethiopia has joined more than 20 other African nations in the African Forest Landscape Restoration Initiative (AFR100), a country-led effort to bring 100 million hectares of land in Africa into reforestation by 2030.
Researchers at Swiss university ETH Zurich, a science, technology, engineering, and mathematics institution, recently identified that global reforestation could essentially digest 205 billion tons of carbon dioxide, including global carbon emissions of 10 billion tons each year due to human activity. Ethiopia’s agriculture has been suffering from the effects of the climate crisis in droughts and flooding, land degradation, and soil erosion. Prime Minister Ahmed said his government is determined to lead his country to overcome deforestation and climate change.
Dr. Dan Ridley-Ellis, Associate Professor and the Head of the Centre for Wood Science and Technology at Edinburgh Napier University in Scotland, pledges that planting trees not only helps mitigate climate change by absorbing the atmosphere's carbon dioxide but also resolves desertification and land degradation. He also added that tree-planting will help supply human beings with “food, shelter, fuel, fodder, medicine, materials” and preserve the environment’s water supply.
Photo:Webshot.