Pakistan gears up for ‘biggest tree planting drive in history’

By News Desk

ISLAMABAD: Prime Minister Imran Khan on Sunday urged all the people, especially the youth, to actively take part in the country’s “biggest tree planting campaign in history”.

On his Twitter account, the Prime Minister said: “And we will be gearing up this monsoon season for our plantation drive — the biggest in Pakistan’s history.”

The Prime Minister stressed that the people have to accelerate their efforts to plant the maximum number of saplings during the ambitious Ten Billion Tree Tsunami project. “I want all Pakistanis, esp (especially) our youth, to gear up for the biggest tree planting campaign in our history.

“We have a lot of catching up to do,” he posted on his Twitter account along with a graph showing numbers of trees per person around different countries of the world. According to the graph, the world has 422 trees on average for every person, but in Pakistan, this ratio stands around five trees per person.

A study in the journal Nature reported close to 3.04 trillion trees on earth. According to another data compiled by different international research bodies, about 50 per cent of these trees in the world are present in the five biggest countries, while two-thirds are in just ten countries, leaving just 1.9 trillion trees for the rest of the world.

Tree wealth, an ecological term, can also be measured in terms of the most significant number of trees per person. As per the world’s population and tree resources, there are 422 trees for every individual.

The countries with the best ratios are Canada with 10,163 trees per person, Russia with 4,461 trees per person, Australia 3,266, Greenland 4,964 and the Central African Republic with 5,152 trees per person.

Bolivia has 5,465 trees per person, while Gabon’s dry’ forests spanning 77 per cent of the region constitute 8,131 trees per person. The US has 699 trees per person, while India has 28.