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India Planted 50 Million Trees In Less Than 24 Hours

Trending News: India Has 50 MILLION More Trees Than It Had Yesterday

Patrick Lejtenyi

July 15, 2016

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Why Is This Important?

Because good things happen in the world too.

Long Story Short

In an attempt to combat climate change, the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh planted nearly 50 million trees in 24 hours, setting a new world record.

Long Story

Though they fell about 700,000 trees short, a massive tree-planting effort in Uttar Pradesh on Monday eclipsed the previous record for most trees planted in 24 hours by a massive margin. Some 49.3 million trees, of 80 different species from 950 nurseries around the state, were planted by 800,000 people in an effort to make India a little more green.

The project is part of the Indian government’s commitments made at the Paris Climate Change Conference, including increasing the country’s tree canopy to cover 95 million hectares (235 million acres) by 2030. It’s hoping all of the country’s 29 states will organize mass tree plantings of their own, and has set aside $6.2-billion to encourage them.

The trees’ ongoing health and growth will be monitored by regular aerial photography, but it’s estimated only 60 percent of them will survive. The others will die from disease or lack of water.

More trees will certainly help the country, where urban air pollution kills an estimated half a million people a year. Six Indian cities—Delhi, Gwalior, Allahabad, Patna, Raipur and Ludhiana—are among the world’s 10 most polluted. And while the new trees won’t change the air quality by itself, the planting is part of an awareness raising campaign about the country’s efforts to clean itself up.

India’s efforts to fight climate change don’t end with afforestation. They've also pledged to create a more sustainable and energy efficient transportation network and rework its energy system, among other steps.

Most observers believe India is sincere in its climate change-fighting efforts, even as they warn that much more is needed to be done.

“The biggest contribution of this tree planting project is, apart from the tokenism, that it focuses on the major issues,” says Anit Mukherjee, a policy fellow at the Center for Global Development. “It addresses many of the big issues for India: Pollution, deforestation, and land use.”