Tree Planting Day: Make the world greener

Tuesday marks China's National Tree Planting Day, a day when people are encouraged to plant trees as part of the country's forestation campaign to protect the environment.

Official data showed Tuesday that China stepped up its greening efforts last year with 3.998 million hectares of forest planted. 

The figure was higher than the 3.83 million hectares of afforestation seen in 2022, according to a report by the National Greening Commission. In addition, the country also restored 4.379 million hectares of degraded grassland and treated 1.905 million hectares of sandy and stony land in 2023.

The following graph shows the country's greening efforts since 2014.

China designated March 12 as National Tree Planting Day in 1979 and launched a nationwide voluntary tree-planting campaign in 1981. Citizens are also encouraged to adopt or nurture trees, donate money and conduct volunteer work related to trees.

The country's internet-based greening campaign, "Ant Forest," allows people to adopt trees by paying due contributions online or by garnering enough credits by performing low-carbon activities like taking public transportation, in exchange for a real tree to be nurtured in their names.

From 2016 to 2020, more than 550 million people had participated in the project to plant over 200 million trees, reducing exhaust equivalent to 12 million tonnes of carbon dioxide.

After decades of afforestation, China has created the world's largest planted forests, with its forest coverage rate more than doubling from 12 percent in the early 1980s to 24.02 percent last year.

As a result of sustained forest conservation and tree planting efforts, a 2019 finding published in Nature Sustainability showed that at least 25 percent of the global foliage expansion since the early 2000s has originated from China, based on data from NASA satellites.

(Cover image via CFP, with input from Xinhua)