The country of Ireland is taking on a massive reforestation project, pledging to plant 22 million trees a year for the next twenty years, for a total of a whopping 440 million trees.
Ireland’s tree-planting is just part of the country’s climate action plan and their goal to be carbon neutral by 2050.
“The Climate Action Plan puts in place a decarbonisation pathway to 2030 which would be consistent with the adoption of a net zero target in Ireland by 2050,” stated Irish officials.
Recent studies have shown that reforestation has the potential to dampen the impacts of climate change as trees take carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, leading to healthier air quality.
Current estimates reveal that about 15 billion trees are cut down on Earth every year by humans. Ireland specifically has seen major loss of forest cover. The country went from having a forest cover of 80 percent to just one percent in 1929. The country has taken steps to rectify this and has been able to grow the area of forest to 10.5 percent of the land area but still falls short of the European average of over 30 percent.
Other countries in the past few years have made similar bold steps to replace the massive deforestation the world has faced in the last 100 years. Earlier this year Ethiopia broken the tree-planting record when it planted 350 million trees in 12 hours.
“The climate action plan commits to delivering an expansion of forestry planting and soil management to ensure that carbon abatement from land-use is delivered over the period 2021 to 2030 and in the years beyond,” said a Department of Communications Climate Action and Environment spokeswoman.
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