UN Environment Program - A unique worldwide tree planting initiative, aimed at empowering citizens to corporations and people up to presidents to embrace the climate change challenge, has now set its sights on planting seven billion trees. It follows the news that the Billion Tree Campaign has in just 18 months catalysed the planting of two billion trees, double its original target.

The campaign, spearheaded by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF), was unveiled in 2006 as one response to the threat but also the opportunities of global warming, as well as to the wider sustainability challenges from water supplies to biodiversity loss. To date the initiative, which is under the patronage of Nobel Peace Prize Laureate and Kenyan Green Belt Movement founder Professor Wangari Maathai and Prince Albert II of Monaco, has broken every target set and has catalyzed tree planting in close to 155 countries.

Achim Steiner, UN Under-Secretary-General and UNEP Executive Director, said: "When the Billion Tree Campaign was launched at the Climate Convention meeting in Nairobi in 2006, no one could have imagined it could have flowered so fast and so far. But it has given expression to the frustrations but also the hopes of millions of people around the world. Having exceeded every target that has been set for the campaign, we are now calling on individuals, communities, business and industry, civil society organisations and governments to evolve this initiative onto a new and even higher level by the crucial climate change conference in Copenhagen in late 2009.

"In 2006 we wondered if a billion tree target was too ambitious; it was not. The goal of two billion trees has also proven to be an underestimate. The goal of planting seven billion trees -- equivalent to just over a tree per person alive on the planet -- must therefore also be do-able given the campaign's extraordinary track record and the self-evident worldwide support," he added.

The Billion Tree Campaign has become a practical expression of private and public concern over global warming. Heads of State including the presidents of Indonesia, the Maldives, Mexico, Turkey and Turkmenistan as well as businesses; cities; faith, youth and community groups have enthusiastically taken part. Individuals have accounted for over half of all participants.

<> In a single day in Uttar Pradesh, India, 10.5 million trees were planted.

<> 35 million young people in Turkey have been mobilised to plant trees.

<> 500,000 schoolchildren in sub-Saharan Africa and the United Kingdom have become engaged.

It has also attracted the support of multilateral organisations including the Convention on Biological Diversity whose new Green Wave initiative was launched in advance of its important conference being held in Bonn, Germany later this month, and which supports the Billion, now Seven Billion, Tree Campaign.