September is Arbor Month, and environmentally-caring South Africans throughout the country are focused on reforestation and are busier than ever doing all they can to plant trees for the nation’s and world’s climate healing.
Recently, Standard published an invitation from Cape Town’s Greenpop organisation, an implementing partner of the United Nations Decade of Ecosystem Restoration, to join Breede Valley “greenies” seven-day Eden Festival of Reforestation Action to be held in October on the Garden Route.
But this month, on 8 September (today), the organisation celebrates its 12th birthday!
Greenpop was started in 2010 with a simple goal, to plant 1 000 trees during Arbor Month in under-greened urban areas of Cape Town.
Then, in the years that followed, it went from focusing on schoolyards in Cape Town and forest patches in the Western Cape, to forest landscapes across Sub-Saharan Africa.
Now 12 years later, they are happy to be able to tell us that they are close to having planted a total of 200 000 trees – in degraded forests, community orchards, and urban spaces in South Africa, Malawi, Tanzania and Zambia.
“But,” says Zoë Gauld-Angelucci, Head of Programmes, “while we are proud of reaching this 200 000 trees milestone, we also firmly believe it is time to stop concentrating on counting trees and rather shift the focus to making trees count. So this month we will be shining the light on ways in which we make trees count within our forest restoration and urban greening projects, and will be announcing our new plans for the future!”
