Ethiopia Planted A Record Amount Of Trees To Fight The Effects Of Climate Change

Aug 07, 2019 by apost team

On Monday, the Ethiopian government announced that their citizens had planted an astounding 353 million trees in just one day. The massive effort was done to help fight climate change and reverse past decades of deforestation. The event is thought to be the largest mass-planting in all of history. It surpassed an effort in India that occurred in 2017 when 66 million trees were planted in over 12 hours.

Ethiopia has joined up with 20 African nations in an effort to restore more than 400,000 square miles of forest found on the continent. The United Nations released a statement stating that the country was covered in 35 percent forest in the last century, but it is now down to just four percent.

Ethiopia and the rest of the African nations are determined to plant millions of trees in an effort to reverse the deforestation that has occurred in the past years. Students and government workers were even given the day off to help plant the needed trees all over the country.

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A study was published earlier in the month in the journal Science stating that if a forest was planted that was double the size of the U.S. it could save our planet from the worst of global warming.

Since the new forests could store 205 metric tons of carbon, this would help decrease the amount of carbon humans have added into the atmosphere all over the world. Scientists are calling this human emissions carbon crisis a climate crisis. They hope that reforestation will help.

The United Kingdom has estimated that they will need to plant at least 1.5 billion trees if they want to reach their goal of being carbon neutral by 2050.

However, setbacks have slowed down the efforts of reforestation all over the world. For example, President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil reversed the protection of the Amazon rainforest, which opened up the area for development. More than 1,330 square miles of the forest has been cut down since he took office just seven months ago.

Tree planting can help humans avoid the worst problems of global warming. We hope that all countries take a close look at how they can help the environment stay on track, for our generation and the ones that come after us.

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