SINCE 1990, the Earth has lost 420 million hectares of forests to land conversion for agriculture, urbanisation, mining and industry.
Forested areas equal to the combined land territories of India and Egypt were lost in the span of a single generation.
It happens gradually, such devastation seldom if ever registers on the public radar in the moment, we only see the enormity of the loss with decades of perspective. Fortunately, global deforestation is slowing down,from 16 million hectares per year in the 1990s to 10 million hectares per year (2015 to 2020).
Still, losing 10 million hectares every year in a heating world is a massive loss for the biosphere, climate stability, and, ultimately, humanity. Recently, the United Nations Development Programme with Oxford University collaborators released a global opinion survey on climate change, "The People's Climate Vote", (drawing 1.2 million respondents, fully detailed at http://bit.ly/2MuT Vh7 ).
It found, among many other things, that a majority of people (54 per cent) favour protecting forests and natural habitats, the highest ranked among 18 possible policy solutions to the climate crisis.
The late Wangari Maathai won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2004 for efforts to develop the Green Belt Movement, a grassroots organisation she began in Kenya 27 years earlier, focused on planting trees to replenish the environment, alleviate poverty, end conflict and generally improve the quality of life.
She mobilised Kenyans, particularly women, to plant more than 30 million trees, and inspired the UN to launch a campaign that led to the planting of 11 billion trees worldwide.
More than 900,000 Kenyan women benefited from her tree-planting campaign by selling seedlings for reforestation. Mass tree plantings became a popular symbol of the world uniting against climate change and environmental destruction, with governments starting to compete on who will plant more.
An African-led movement to plant a 8,048km forest wall to fight the climate crisis is set to become the largest living structure on Earth,three times the size of the Great Barrier Reef. India's forests and other habitats chronically face pressure from population rise and industrial development.
After the Paris Agreement(2015) in July 2016, the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh set a world record in mass tree planting — 800,000 volunteers planted 50 million trees in a single day, broken the following year by the state of Madhya Pradesh, which had 1.5 million volunteers planting 66 million tree saplings in just 12 hours.
In 2019, Ethiopia, whose forest cover declined from 35 per cent in the early 20th century to about four per cent in the 2000s, decided to stop deforestation by deploying 23 million volunteers at 1,000 planting sites across the country and managed to plant more than 350 million saplings in just 12 hours.
In Malaysia, an early champion of massive tree planting was Tun Jeanne Abdullah, the wife of former prime minister Tun Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, and also the chairman of Tropical Rainforest Conservation and Research Centre Sdn Bhd, whose numerous projects include a joint-effort with the Sabah government to restore tropical rainforests and address the critical rate of biodiversity loss in Malaysia on a 224-hectare site.
Two weeks ago, Prime Minister Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin launched the 100 Million Tree-Planting Campaign as part of the Greening Malaysia Programme and the national agenda to address climate change and improve quality of life.
The five-year programme will help preserve biodiversity — an invaluable national treasure — and improve environmental quality.
At about the same time, Sabah Chief Minister Datuk Seri Hajiji Noor launched a state level campaign to plant 36 million trees within the next five years, saying the state government would continue to support measures to ensure forest reserves are maintained and conserved.
Amidst all the excitement of these massive tree-planting programmes, experts at the prestigious Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, the United Kingdom, recently cautioned that planting the wrong tree in the wrong place can do more harm than good.
They provided 10 golden rules (visit http://bit.ly/kew-rules). I'll just cite the last one: make it pay, which points out that the sustainability of tree replanting rests on providing a source of income for all stakeholders, including the poorest.
Two final observations: megaplanting efforts have been misused by governments or companies with an otherwise bad environmental and political track record to rebrand themselves as conscientious, progressive, and well-intentioned, distracting the public from other environmental problems they are causing. Let us hope that Malaysia will avoid such issues.
The writer is ambassador and science adviser of the Campaign for Nature and chairman of Atri Advisory