Children and Youths exclaim: “STOP SHOOTING START PLANTING”

April 4, 2015: With the slogan of “Stop Shooting Start Planting” Plant-for-the-Planet initiates  worldwide communication campaign of the children and youths.

The Plant-for-the-Planet Children’s Initiative was initiated in January 2007 and originated from a school report on the climate crisis by Felix Finkbeiner. Felix put forward the vision that children could plant one million trees in every country in the world to balance carbon emissions. In the years that followed, Plant-for-the-Planet evolved into a global movement where thousands of children across the world are committed to the goal. The movement understands its role as being an initiative of world citizens who are committed to climate justice in the sense of achieving an overall reduction of greenhouse gas emissions and a unified distribution of these emissions among all of humankind.

Plant-for-the-Planet has had democratic structure since March 2011. It has two elected Global Boards, one for the children aged 8-14, and one for the youth aged 15-21; each consists of 14 children with representatives from 8 world regions. Since the children took over responsibility for the Billion Tree Campaign from UNEP in 2011, the children have set themselves a new goal of planting 1,000 billion trees worldwide by 2020. With such a giant CO2 storage facility, 10 billion tons of CO2 could be offset, buying us valuable time to permanently reduce our CO2 emissions (one tree can bind, on average, 10 kg of CO2 per year). If every global citizen plants 150 trees by 2020, then this goal will be met.

The current tree-count can be followed on the Plant-for-the-Planet website, via tree-o-meter: So far over 13 billion trees have been planted across 193 countries. The worldwide communication campaign of the student initiative operates under the slogan “Stop talking, Start planting” from which is inspired the new slogan “Stop shooting, Start Planting”.

The message from Plant-for-the-Planet to the Head of the Government :

” The 21st century starts showing how much we have to change our actions relative the planet. In the last ten years we saw a lot of natural disasters occasioned by Climate Change. Now we know, Climate Change is Human-made and we have to do all to adapt ourselves to the present-day climate troubles and stop the climate change circle. The problem now is act quickly and efficaciously! Despite your speeches often speak of the protection of the environment, defense of the weak and of world peace the reality is very different, and those speeches that you pronounced turn out to be just empty words. For us it is unthinkable that a Nobel prize for peace declares war, and despite wants to drastically reduce the CO2 emissions of its new country every day authorizes the extraction of oil and gas in the name of economic development. If you truly want to ensure peace and the integrity of our environment, you must take a firm stand against the global warming and against the wars, not only in words but also in deeds. Instead of increasing military spending, governments should allocate more resources in the reduction of C02 emissions. In the last months the president Obama is pressing the governments of the NATO to increase the military expenditures to almost 2% of GDP. It means an increase of the military expenditures of billions and billions of dollars. The climate crisis should have the priority, not the war!”

For more info: www.plant-for-the-planet.org