APA-Addis Ababa (Ethiopia) In a record-breaking day, Ethiopia planted over 500 million tree seedlings in a day in an ambitious move to counter the effects of deforestation and climate change.
Prime Minister Ahmed late on Monday announced that more than 566 million tree seedlings were planted on Monday in every part of Ethiopia from early morning until the evening.
“We planned, we united and we achieved,” Ahmed said in a statement.
The latest push is a part of the green legacy initiative or GLI plan to plant at least 6 billion seedlings nationwide.
Fruits and related species constitute more than 55 percent of the over 6 billion seedlings, he said
The green initiative helped to plant a total of 25 billion tree seedlings over the past three years through public mobilization. Authorities put the average survival rate of the planted seedlings at 84 percent.
“Our objective was to break our own record,” Prime Minister Abiy said Sunday in a statement.
The previous mass tree planting exercise saw a record of 350 million tree-planting and the PM said the sum of each person’s effort led to a new record.
The initiative aims to tackle the effects of deforestation and climate change in the country.
The United Nations estimates that Ethiopia’s forest coverage has declined drastically to a low of just 4 per cent in the 2000s from 35 per cent a century earlier.
Trees provide many ecosystem services and environmental benefits for the planet as a whole. As they grow, they absorb and store carbon dioxide—a major driver of global heating, the PM was quoted as saying while launching the tree planting Monday morning.
MG/as/APA