Recently, the ‘Trillion Trees Program’ was launched by three conservation organizations – BirdLife International, the Wildlife Conservation Society and WWF.
‘Trillion Trees Program’ is a 25-year tree planting and restoration effort.
Trillion Trees was initiated by Restore UK, established in 2001 as a grant-making charity to invest in the protection and restoration of Britain’s natural habitat. This vision has since expanded to incorporate environmental and biodiversity issues around the world.
The response of the Trillion Trees partnership is twofold: catalyze large-scale investments to protect, restore, and replant trees in the most at-risk landscapes; and inspire greater action under private and public forest commitments.
The tree-planting partners are guided by the Paris Climate Agreement, the New York Declaration on Forests, and the UN Convention on Biodiversity.
Programme policy goals include the Bonn Challenge to restore 350 million hectares of forests by 2030, the Convention on Biological Diversity’s Aichi Targets, which aim to halve forest loss by 2020, and the New York Declaration on Forests, which aims to end deforestation by 2030 and reinforces the Bonn Challenge restoration goal.
Projects under development include:
– Supporting long-term financing, expansion and strengthening of the protected areas network in Colombia
– Scaling up environmental certification in locally controlled forests in Tanzania
– Supporting the design and financing of large-scale restoration plans for vulnerable watershed areas of the Rwandan highlands
– Establishing sustainable, deforestation-free models of cocoa production linked to protection of adjacent forests in multiple landscapes in Africa and elsewhere.
Background:
The planet is losing 10 billion trees every year, leading to widespread impacts on biodiversity, carbon sequestration, local economies and human health.
Roughly half of the world’s original six trillion trees have been lost since the beginning of civilization.
Most of the remaining forests have been damaged by industrial-scale human activities. Yet, they still hold more than 45 percent of the terrestrial carbon, are home to two-thirds of all land-based plants and animals, and support the livelihoods of 1.6 billion people.
One trillion is the number of new trees needed to reverse the global decline in tree cover.