#TSRWeGlobal: We Stan a climate conscious country! #Ethiopia is believed to have set a world record by planting more than 353 million trees in less than 12 hours.
The large effort was part of a wider reforestation campaign called “Green Legacy,” which is spearheaded by the country’s Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed, @cnn reports. Millions of Ethiopians across the country united to take part in the challenge.
Within those first six hours, Ahmed tweeted that about 150 million trees had been planted. “We’re halfway to our goal,” he reported and encouraged Ethiopians to “build on the momentum in the remaining hours.”
After the 12-hour period ended, the Prime Minister Tweeted that Ethiopia not only met its “collective #GreenLegacy goal,” but exceeded it. A total of 353,633,660 tree seedlings had been planted when their goal was to plant 200 million trees in one day.
In 2017, India set the world record when an estimated 1.5 million volunteers planted 66 million trees in 12 hours. Ethiopia’s goal for the whole season is to plant 4 billion trees during the rainy season, which ends in October.
According to Farm Africa, an organization working on reforestation efforts in East Africa and helping farmers out of poverty, less than 4% of Ethiopia’s land is forested, compared to around 30% at the end of the 1800s.
Ethiopia is also suffering from the effects of climate crisis including land degradation, soil erosion, deforestation, and recurrent droughts and flooding exacerbated by agriculture especially considering that 80% of Ethiopia’s population depends on agriculture as a livelihood, the efforts are extremely important.
In 2017, Ethiopia joined more than 20 other African nations in pledging to restore 100 million hectares of land as part of the African Forest Landscape Restoration Initiative.
A recent study estimated that restoring the world’s lost forests could remove two thirds of all the planet-warming carbon that is in the atmosphere due to human activity.
We’ll keep you posted on this one, Roommates!
