World Environment Day: Mahindra Group's new initiative motivates citizens to plant trees

Multinational conglomerate Mahindra Group Tuesday launched a new initiative to motivate citizens to plant trees at a time when India is lagging behind in achieving its third commitment under the Paris Agreement. The move assumes significance as it comes ahead of World Environment Day.

The country's third commitment under the Paris pact was to create an additional 'carbon sink' of 2.5-3 billion tonnes which translates to 75 billion trees, covering area of Rajasthan. The group, which has planted 16 million trees in the last 12 years, wants to generate awareness among people about the importance of planting trees in order to increase carbon sink in the country for combating climate change.

"The activity of tree planting need to be stepped up. Until now we are doing well in the first two commitments under the Paris pact and on the third commitment, we need to move forward little bit more," the Group's Chief Sustainability Officer Anirban Ghosh told PTI. In the last 12 years, the group has been planting trees and enhancing biodiversity in many different ways. "We thought of leveraging this experience and take the biodiversity programme to the much wider and bigger audience because the problem in India is very large," he said.

Stressing on the need to make sustainable climate action personal on eve of World Environment day, Ghosh said under the new campaign 'Celebrate Differently', the Group wants to give every Indian a change to plant a tree and celebrate differently on the occasions they have in their life. Under the campaign, the company is looking at individuals who want to plant tree directly and those who cannot plant can share their comment on #RiseAgainstClimateChange and the company will do.

This is part of the Mahindra Hariyali, a tree plantation movement. At present, the Group's three biggest companies together have a carbon footprint of 1.8 million tonnes. It is aiming to be a carbon neutral group by 2040. The first two commitments under the Paris pact are reducing greenhouse gas emission intensity of India's GDP by 33-35 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030 and 40 per cent of the country's power capacity is based on non-fossil fuel sources.

(With inputs from agencies.)