This Man Planted 152 Million Mangrove Trees in 10 Years

A lot of environmentalists would say that planting a tree at least once in your life can bring a huge help and difference in the Earth's future. For Haidar el Ali, a retired politician from Senegal, he highly believes that trees are very essential and should be given importance to as early as now, and planting a tree could help save the world from calamity. 

Haidar has been known to have a big heart when it comes to the environment. Haidar has always been an environmentalist and many consider him as a nature-lover, given because of his love and compassion of saving Mother Earth. In fact, he has planted to almost 152 million mangrove trees in his life, which also became his greatest life legacy.

According to Haidar in one of his statements, he shared his mangrove tree planting expedition by showing a mangrove leaf. He also shared how mangroves should be planted.

First, according to Haidar, you take the mangrove leaf and plant it in the lower third of the mud. Second, you need to take two steps away from it and plant another one for it to have its own space to grow. 

Haidar and his tree planting expedition

Haidar has been planting trees since 2009. For a decade, he has helped thousands of forests and slumps by planting trees around it. Haidar's environmental actions and care for Mother Nature has been recognized not only in Senegal but also in the whole world.

In fact, his efforts became a huge impact and influence on other environmentalists and environmental organizations and contributed to the history of modern large-scale reforestation. Haidar is also praised and given recognition for restoring the entire Senegalese mangrove swamp that most people thought it cannot be saved any more. 

Importance of forest restorations

One of the most resilient habitats for humans and animals are the forests. Earth is known to have many forests and through the years, because of the growing economy, forests have been used in different ways. However, with the growing economy and ever since modernization began, forests have degraded and people are failing to see the impact it can cause in the future. 

However, when the scientific community began to encourage everyone to plant trees and see the importance of taking care of nature, many people have started to make ways on how they can help restore the lost forest ecosystems in their own ways. And surprisingly, the results were remarkable and it gave hope to other people who have thought that forests cannot be saved.

Haidar was also the former Senegal Minister for Ecology and later on became Minister for Fisheries. Before creating the amazing and remarkable swamp of mangrove trees, he was also able to fight and rally with citizens from the local coastal population and asked them to help him plant the 152 million mangrove buds by hand. The people rallied by his side and together they made it possible to create a coastal mangrove forest and reached about hundreds of square miles-- which became very popular and is considered to be one of the largest mangrove forests in the whole world. 

The mangrove swamp and its contribution to Earth's ecosystem

Just recently, Jean Francois Bastin-- ecologist and famous geographer who is known to use remote sensing to study the relationship between global change and terrestrial ecosystems-- showed an estimate of 2.4 billion acres of traditional forest that cover the whole planet can suck up to 25% of all carbon currently blown in the atmosphere. 

Mangrove ecosystems are known to store immense amounts of carbon in their concealed root systems, and their coastal vegetation is some of Earth's most important ecosystem.