Ethiopia just planted over 353 million trees in 12 hours! Officials believe it is a world-record achievement by a landslide. The last world record for tree planting was set by India in 2017 when around 1.5 million volunteers planted 66 million in 12 hours, and before that, it was India as well when 800,000 volunteers planted more than 50 million trees in 2016.
Ethiopia is Africa’s second-most populous nation. This tree planting challenge encouraged all of the country’s many citizens to plant 200 million trees in one day. The event was part of a wider reforestation campaign named “Green Legacy,” spearheaded by the country’s Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed. The campaign is taking place in 1,000 sites across the country. State media has been running promotional videos urging the public to plant and care for trees. Millions of Ethiopians were invited to take part, and take part they did!
Some government offices have even been shut down to allow civil servants to take part in the campaign, and staff from the United Nations, the African Union, and foreign embassies in Ethiopia have also participated in the exercise.
Within the first six hours, Ahmed tweeted that around 150 million trees had been planted. “We’re halfway to our goal,” he said and encouraged Ethiopians to “build on the momentum in the remaining hours.” At the end of the 12-hour period, the Prime Minister took to Twitter again to announce that Ethiopia not only met its “collective #GreenLegacy goal,” but exceeded it!
The country’s minister for innovation and technology, Getahun Mekuria, tweeted that a total of 353,633,660 tree seedlings had been planted. The seedlings being planted by volunteers were counted by officials.
As big as that total number seems, the overall goal for the whole season of tree planting is much bigger than that. The national tree planting campaign aims to plant 4 billion indigenous trees during “the rainy season”—between May and October—according to a May tweet by Ahmed.
Ethiopia’s forest coverage declined from 35% of total land in the early 20th century to a little above 4% in the 2000s, according to the United Nations. The country has been suffering from the effects of the climate crisis, with land degradation, soil erosion, deforestation, and recurrent droughts and flooding exacerbated by agriculture. 80% of its population depends on agriculture as a livelihood.
Green Legacy aims to counter the effects of this drastic deforestation and in so doing also combat climate change in the drought-prone country. It is all part of the African Forest Landscape Restoration Initiative—a pledge made by over 20 African countries in 2017 to restore 100 million hectares of land across the continent.
Restoring the world’s lost forests could remove two-thirds of all the planet-warming carbon that is in the atmosphere because of human activity, a recent study carried out by researchers at Swiss university ETH Zurich estimated. The researchers calculated that restoring degraded forests all over the world could capture about 205 billion tons of carbon in total, which could make all the difference in the world since global carbon emissions are around 10 billion tons per year.
