Cuba Does Its Part in Billion Tree Campaign
by Eliza Barclay, Nomad on 09.26.07
With a push from the United Nations "Plant for the Planet: Billion Tree Campaign", designed to encourage tree planting around the world, Cuba has committed to plant some 135 million trees this year.
"Forests are natural and economically important ‘sinks’, sequestrating carbon from the atmosphere and locking it away in trunks and branches. Globally, forest cover is at least one-third less than what it once was. It is time to reverse the trends, it is time to act," says Achim Steiner, UNEP Executive Director.
Experts say (Spanish link) that the primary threat to Cuba's forests are fires, which in the last five years have caused 100 million pesos worth of damage over an area of 57,000 hectares.
Before the Cuban revolution in 1959, 13.4% of the national territory was covered by trees. The government's intensive reforestation program has increased the national forest cover to nearly 25% at a rate of 0.6% per year.
According to the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), Cuba, Uruguay, Chile and Costa Rica are the only Latin American countries that have implemented aggressive reforestation efforts.:: Via Adelante
Ted Turner at the Clinton Global Initiative
|
National Initiative to Create 250,000 Green-Collar Jobs for Urban America
|
This is an impressive step. I believe the Cuban authorities also do it because they know that reforestation brings with it not only environmental benefits, but also economic benefits for the locals living in these areas - from additional income (fruit trees) to improvement of crops (when interplanted with crops to conserve the soil and organically fertilize the crops).
Raz @ Eco-Libris
http://www.ecolibris.net
This is really exciting, but this is also just Cuba. Cuba is not very big. Its wonderful that there planting all of these trees, but didn't any larger countries commit to anything like this?
Cuba is only about 42,000 square miles. This is a hell of a commitment. Good for them.
Cuba is such an intriguing country - loathed by the power elite in the US - but constantly coming out with interesting environmental programs like this.
Billions are spend by developed and developing nations ;atleast a small percentage of this huge sum can be spend for planting saplings.
Really how much one would cost?Then why they hesitate to do agressive reforestation,that too each of us live in a world of global warming?
Project Green Hands (projectgreenhands.org) is an effort by Isha Foundation in India to bring back forest cover in India where there has been severe erosion and threatens to be worse consequences.
Last year they set the Guiness World Record for the most trees planted in one day: 852,587. I believe they are going for 25 million planted in 2007.
Not only do we need to plant more trees, we need to encourage businesses not to destroy them or replace any they take away. I have been watching a new construction project near my work and they just leveled everything, tore up all the trees. If we are serious about the planet, there should be a requirement that developers replace tree cover they take away in some form.