ISLAMABAD: Prime Minister Imran Khan has urged the nation to take part in the tree plantation drive.
In a tweet posted Sunday, the prime minister urged the people, especially the youth, “to gear up for the biggest tree planting campaign [Billion Tree Tsunami] in our history”.
I want all Pakistanis, esp our youth, to gear up for the biggest tree planting campaign in our history. We have a lot of catching up to do. pic.twitter.com/miObo6XLK6
— Imran Khan (@ImranKhanPTI) June 27, 2021
The ambitious project — which is supported by the United Nations Environment Programme — sets out to plant ten billion trees by 2023. Launched in 2019, the project just reached a new milestone — the planting of the billionth tree — earlier this month.
In his tweet, which was accompanied by an infographic showing tree-per-person ratios across the world, Imran stressed that the nation had “a lot of catching up to do”.
The data graph suggested there were on average 422 trees for a person around the globe but in Pakistan, the ratio stood at five trees.
A 2015 study revealed that the planet is home to 3.04 trillion trees, blowing away the previous estimate of 400 billion. That meant, the researchers said, that there were 422 trees for every person on Earth.
“We can now say that there’s less trees than at any point in human civilisation,” said Thomas Crowther, a postdoctoral researcher at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies who is the lead author on the research.
“Since the spread of human influence, we’ve reduced the number almost by half, which is an astronomical thing.”
The paper estimated that humans and other causes, such as wildfires and pest outbreaks, are responsible for the loss of 15.3 billion trees each year — although the authors said at a press conference that perhaps 5 billion of those may grow back each year, so the net loss is about 10 billion annually.
