250 million saplings planted in Uttar Pradesh

More than a million people, in the first week of July, began planting 250 million saplings in India’s most populous state. This activity was a part of an annual mass tree planting campaign to reduce carbon emissions and mitigate the effects of global climate change.

Lawmakers, government officials and volunteers from social organizations swarmed riverbanks, farms, forests, schools and government buildings, planting saplings at designated spots. The effort spans 68,000 villages and 83,000 forest sites in Uttar Pradesh state.Social organizations planted a large number of “peepal” trees (Ficus religiosa) in Lucknow, the state capital, which is recovering from a devastating surge of coronavirus infections.

Since the launch of the tree-planting drive four years ago, the forest cover of Uttar Pradesh — home to 230 million people — has gone up by more than 3 percent, compared to the national average of 2.89 percent.The long-term survival of trees planted in such mass campaigns remains a concern. Usually, only 60 percent of saplings survive, with the rest succumbing to disease or lack of water. However, the survival rate of saplings in the past four years has gone up to 80 percent, thanks to better care and methods such as geo-tagging trees with QR codes in order to monitor their growth.

India’s federal government is encouraging all 28 states to expedite tree-planting drives to increase forest cover, part of commitments made at the 2015 climate change summit in Paris. The government designated more than $6.2 billion for tree planting across the country, in keeping with its pledge to push India’s forest cover to 95 million hectares (235 million acres) by 2030.

Source: Associated Press