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India has broken its own world record by planting 66 million trees in just 12 hours, according to a Government official, in a bid to honour a pledge made at the Paris Climate Change Conference.
More than 1.5 million volunteers turned out on Sunday between 7am and 7pm to plant the massive number of tree saplings along the Narmada River in the state of Madhya Pradesh.
State Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan announced the new record on Twitter.
In 2016, India set the previous record when it planted more than 50 million trees in one day at more than 6,000 locations across the state of Uttar Pradesh.
Guinness World Records' adjudicators reportedly monitored Sunday's plantation and are expected to confirm the new record in the coming weeks.
Under the Paris Agreement, India agreed to spend $6 billion to reforest 12 per cent of its land and help mitigate the effects of climate change.
Other nations are also undertaking massive tree-planting efforts to reduce deforestation and climate change.
At the end of 2016, 10 African nations pledged to restore 31.7 million hectares of land as part of the African Forest Landscape Restoration Initiative.
In Australia, a team of engineers plan to use drones to plant 1 billion trees every year.
Dr Susan Graham has helped build a drone system that can scan the land, identify ideal places to grow trees, and then fire germinated seeds into the soil.
Deforestation and forest degradation make up 17 per cent of the world's carbon emissions — more than the entire world's transportation sector, according to the United Nations.
The planet loses 15 billion trees every year and much of it is cleared for farmland to feed the world's booming population, but it is feared this could be exacerbating climate change.
Topics: environment, environmental-impact, forests, climate-change, india