220 million trees grow in India

It’s Monday, August 12, and India is going to look a whole lot greener.

In just one day, more than a million students, government officials, and volunteers in India planted a whopping 220 million trees in the subcontinent’s most populated state, Uttar Pradesh. The marathon 24-hour tree-planting frenzy was all thanks to a government campaign to combat climate change and improve the environment, according to The Associated Press.

“We set the target of 220 million because Uttar Pradesh is home to 220 million people,” state Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath told The Associated Press.

Dozens of species of saplings were planted in over 1.4 million locations, including 60,000 villages. Though the saplings are planted, they’re not entirely out of the woods, so to speak. Usually, only about 60 percent of saplings survive, with the rest succumbing to disease or lack of water.

In India, air pollution kills over a million people per year. Right now, the country is home to 9 of the top 10 most polluted cities in the world. As part of the Paris Agreement, India pledged to increase forest cover to 235 million acres — one-third of the country’s land area — by 2030, but its growing population of 1.3 billion people and rapid industrialization are hampering those efforts.

Of course, planting saplings is not the end-all-be-all solution, but volunteers hoped getting their hands dirty would spur new climate-forward activity to take root.

— Paola Rosa-Aquino

The Smog

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