Friday, August 14, 2009

New tree planting world record!

The race is on! Only last month we reported here that Pakistan is holding the tree planting Guinness World Record. Well, not anymore. The new record holder is India!

Treehugger reported that volunteers in Dungarpur, India attempted on Wednesday to plant 600,000 trees in 24 hours. The last record from last month was was 541,176 trees planted in one day.

UNEP, which highlights this initiative with regards to its (seven)
billion tree campaign, adds on its website the following details:

The volunteers will be planting Mango, Neem, Teak and Jatropha trees; all indigenous species that will eventually provide food, medicinal value and timber to the community.

Once planted, the trees will be 'adopted' by local villagers to ensure that they are watered and maintained. The after-care will be supervised by the Indian Forestry Service. The trees will also be registered under UNEP's Billion Tree Campaign, and will go a long way to helping it meet its target of 7 billion trees planted by December 2009.

Well, now we have to wait and see how much time the current record will hold. In any event, we hope it will be broken many more times, as no matter who holds it, we all profit from this race!

Yours,
Raz @ Eco-Libris

Eco-Libris: promoting green reading!