Cuba to plant 135 million trees

By IANS

Havana : Cuba is planning to plant 135 million trees this year as part of a UN Environment Programme (UNEP) project, the Spanish news agency EFE reported.


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The UNEP has launched a major worldwide tree planting campaign “Plant for the Planet: Billion Tree Campaign”. The campaign strongly encourages the planting of indigenous trees that are appropriate to a particular environment.

Cuba expects to help “compensate, in some way, for the deforestation that causes some three trillion adult trees to disappear from the planet each year”, said the head of the island’s national forestry programme, Elias Linares Landa.

Linares said some 2.7 million hectares of land in Cuba was currently forested.

Linares said Cuba had its own forestry fund to develop and manage forests, wildlife, education and training programmes.

In 2006, Cuba increased its forests by more than 33,000 hectares and reduced emissions of pollutants, according to official figures.

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