Planting Trees

Something we can do by ourselves to deal with the threat of climate change is to plant more trees. A campaign to plant a billion trees within a year was launched earlier this month at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Nairobi, Kenya. Each one of us can take the first step by joining the world-wide biilliontree campaign wherever we live. The United Nations Environment Programme is coordinating the rehabilitation of tens of millions of hectares of degraded land and reforesting the Earth. The productivity of the soil has to be restored together with provision of adequate water resources. Expanding tree cover areas will mitigate the build-up of atmospheric carbon dioxide, a global warming greenhouse gas. To make up for the loss of trees in the past decade, environment experts said that 130 million hectares will have to be reforested, and to avert serious climate change we will have to plant some 14 billion trees every year for ten consecutive years. I agree with the United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan when he stated at the Climate Change Conference in Nairobi that there was lack of leadership on climate change. I also hear the warnings of the UNEP Executive Director, Achim Steiner, that we have a short time to avert serious climate change. But I’ve come across some concrete successes in tree planting through community efforts. TheCommunity-based Forestry Management project, organized by the Ministry of Forestry in Indonesia, is one such action. This kind of success gives us hope that more could be organized at the community level with available local human resources. A lot of good work has already been done in this area by the World Agroforestry Centre in transforming lives and landscapes. The “Tree of Change” promotional education/communication programme, encourages people to participate in important action such as watershed protection, biodiversity conservation, climate change adaptation and mitigation, and environment governance.

Filed under Environment |