Collaboration to accelerate tree planting through schools

Climate change has been an increasingly hot topic. And this week, Cabinet Secretaries Soipan Tuya (Environment, Climate Change and Forestry) and Ezekiel Machogu (Education) co-chaired an inter-ministerial meeting on collaboration.

With an estimated 17 million learners and 600,000 educators in institutions across the country, a target of growing 35 million trees and producing 300 million seedlings annually, the Ministry of Education is one of the key drivers of the national tree-growing programme.

Machogu revealed that they will seek approval from the National Treasury to allocate 5 per cent of the Education Ministry budget to tree planting.

Kenya's government last year initiated a campaign to plant 15 billion trees by 2032, a move aimed at reducing greenhouse emissions, stopping and reversing deforestation and, restoring 5.1 million hectares of deforested and degraded landscapes through the African Landscape Restoration Initiative. 

For context, at the end of 2022, Kenya contributed a stunning 0.22% of the world's total Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions compared to Rwanda's 0.02% or the United States' 11.19% and China's 29.16%. More data is available from the EDGAR database(comparing both GHG and CO2 emissions) and a 'heat map' representation on Wikipedia.

Let's put an eco-friendly pin on that for now.–BM