There aren’t many honest people left who still deny that climate change is here to stay and that it inflicts us with heatwaves, floods, droughts, storms and hurricanes.

This is the result of human activity, principally the burning of fossil fuels currently producing 100 million tons of greenhouse gases a day.

But burning fossil fuels is only one part of the climate change equation. We are consuming Earth’s natural resources, including sunlight, the atmosphere, water, land, vegetation, crops and animal life, at an alarming rate.

Earth can renew these resources in its own good time, but we are not giving it the time it needs to do so.

Last year, we burned through our renewable resources by August 8 and it’s getting worse because this year we’ve burnt through them by July 29 – Earth Overshoot Day. We are using up more resources than our planet can renew.

We can recycle and reuse Earth’s renewable resources, but this should not be done with the use of non-renewable fossil fuels. Once they have been burnt, they can never be replaced.

This burning of fossil fuels is the major source of the carbon dioxide (CO2) that is being released into the atmosphere, besides the pollution it causes leading to asthma, lung cancer, emphysema and chronic bronchitis, with our children being particularly vulnerable.

Greenhouse Gas is 80 per cent CO2 and is the main contributor to climate change, trapping the heat from the sun in the Earth’s atmosphere and overheating the planet. Our carbon footprint is the amount of CO2 released into the atmosphere as a result of our activities. If we were to reduce the global carbon footprint by 50 per cent, we would move Earth Overshoot Day back by 93 days.

If we do not reduce the global carbon footprint drastically, then climate change will really run wild.

To put things into perspective, a medium-sized car weighs about one ton and we currently produce the same weight as 40 million cars of CO2 in a year, which accounts for more than three-quarters of planet-warming emissions.

Transport and agriculture ac-count for healthy percentages too. Trees are an important part of the solution to reduce the carbon footprint, taking CO2 from the atmosphere to make wood and releasing oxygen in the process. But there are challenges.

The world’s  rainforests are currently disappearing at the rate of 5,000 football pitches per hour

There were once six trillion trees on the planet, now there are only three trillion and we’re still losing 10 billion trees per year.

The rainforests are currently disappearing at the rate of 5,000 football pitches per hour. This leads to a changing climate, a shrinking habitat for wildlife and harder lives for billions of people.

One large tree can give a day’s supply of oxygen to four people. A healthy tree can store six kilos of carbon in a year but burning a gallon of petrol produces almost 20 kilos of CO2. Clearly, from these figures, we must have many more trees if we are serious about reducing our carbon footprint.

The good thing is that some people are doing something about it. Once again, the younger generation is at the forefront in the fight against climate change.

In March, more than 1.4 million young people around the world took part in school strikes for climate action. Felix Finkbeiner was nine-years-old in 2007 when he gave a class presentation on global warming in which he suggested to classmates that children should plant one million trees in each country of the world.

Together with many of his classmates, Felix planted a tree on March 28, 2007, and launched the Plant-for-the-Planet initiative.

After three years, the initiative planted its millionth tree. 

At age 10, he spoke in the European Parliament and, at age 13, at the UN General Assembly.

He now leads an organisation with 130 employees internationally and 70,000 members in 67 countries. Plant-for-the-Planet now leads the UN Trillion Tree Campaign, as part of which 14 billion trees have been planted so far by contributing companies, organisations and governments. 

The top 10 tree-planting countries are China (2.8 billion), India (2.5 billion), Ethiopia (1.7 billion), Pakistan (1 billion), Mexico (789 million), France (723 million), Turkey (716 million), Peru (646 million), Nigeria (626 million) and Kenya (542 million).

Closer to home, young people organised a grassroots-led protest to oppose the removal of hundreds of trees that will be making way for the Central Link Project – an infrastructural initiative between Rabat and Attard intended to reduce traffic. The same group who are campaigning for the protection of trees in Malta also visited Santa Luċija where 295 trees are being felled to make way for underground tunnels.

How many mature trees have we killed in Malta? How many more are we going to kill? How many million trees are we planting?

George Camilleri is a Council Member of Din l-Art Ħelwa.