Clare Dubois, a business life coach, almost fell off the ravine, but a tree stopped the car from going over the edge. She took it as a sign. She felt that she needed to do something to have more trees around to save more people. With the help of a friend, Bernadette Rider, she formed TreeSisters and its main mission is to replant trees that will help restore the forests within a decade.
In 2014, this new charity that is dedicated to planting more trees was able to plant 12,000 trees and it was funded by women who made small monthly donations to this tree planting project. Today, what once was a start-up non-profit organization is now planting 2.2 million trees in some of the world's rainforests in India, Kenya, Madagascar, Cameroon, and Brazil.
"It has become so natural for people to take nature for granted. Now, it is time to make it natural for people to give back to nature," Dubois said. She was musing about the idea of people being consumer species and what it would take for them to become a restorer type of species. Dubois is not alone in this battle against climate change by planting more trees. The global elite has been hugging this rhetoric as if they have woken up from a bad dream.
A forest with a lot of trees can do communities in the world a lot of good. It could keep the world cooler by fighting against the greenhouse gases present in the atmosphere. Trees encourage rainfall, reduce air pollution and provide an economic resource for communities. This is what experts call as the "natural solution to climate change." The whole package includes many forms of ecological restoration efforts to capture carbon emissions and find more natural ways to mitigate the global warming crisis.
Tree planting could provide at least 37% of what is needed to mitigate the effects of carbon emissions in the environment. It could result in the lowering of the global heating threshold of 2 degrees Celsius.
In March of this year, the United Nations announced the project of a Decade of Ecosystem Restoration. The project is targeting the restoration of 350m hectares by 2030. The government of India pledged to plant 13m hectares of forests by 2020 while America is aiming at restoring 20m hectares of rainforest. The African countries agreed to restore 100m hectares of land by 2030.
All these aspirations are genuinely ideal, but tree planting is not as easy as grabbing sampling, sticking it to the ground and wait for it to grow. Though the intent to replant the forests is good, non-native tree plantations don't always survive. Sometimes, they cause serious problems in biodiversity too. But awareness of what can be done to help the environment helps make a dent in the problem. As Dubois said, "Tree planting is a tangible solution. It is life-giving and it is simple."
