Turkmenistan’s 2.2 million pledge to the Trees in Cities Challenge brings the initiative to ‎over 10 million trees.

All over the world, mayors and local authorities are taking climate action through tree-planting in and around cities. The benefits of urban forests are plentiful: aside from filtering air pollutants, a single tree can absorb up to 150kg of CO2 per year, help regulate urban temperatures, reduce landslides, control surface water, and limit flood damage. Increasingly, cities are recognizing trees as crucial allies in the fight against polluted air and climate change. The value of access to parks and green areas for citizens’ welfare is felt more acutely than ever at the current juncture, when many cities around the world close them to enforce social distancing and forced home confinement in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The government of Turkmenistan is joining these initiatives by supporting the “Trees in Cities Challenge”, a global tree-planting campaign launched at the 2019 Climate Action Summit. At the Regional Forum for Sustainable Development in the UNECE Region held on 19 March 2020, it announced its intention to plant over 2.2 million trees in the country’s cities in 2020, out of which 1.6 million trees will be planted in the capital, Ashgabat.

To learn more about this please click here.  To learn more about the Trees in Cities campaign please go here https://treesincities.unece.org/