The 

Billion Tree Tsunami was launched in 2014, by the government of Khyber

Pakhtunkhwa (KPK), Pakistan, as a response to the challenge of global warming. Pakistan's Billion
Tree Tsunami restores 350,000 hectares of forests and degraded land to surpass its Bonn
Challenge commitment. The project aimed at improving the ecosystems of classified forests, as well
as privately owned waste and farm lands, and therefore entails working in close collaboration with
concerned communities and stakeholders to ensure their meaningful participation through
effectuating project promotion and extension services The projected was completed in August 2017,
ahead of schedule.

The Billion Tree Tsunami Project is driven by the Government of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s vision of
green growth which ties in the needs for sustainable forestry development, generating green jobs,
gender empowerment, preserving Pakistan’s natural capital while also addressing the global issue of
climate change

On 3 September 2018, after becoming Prime Minister of Pakistan following the 2018 Pakistani
general election, Imran Khan launched a 5-year, country-wide 10 billion tree plantation drive from
Makhniyal, KPK to combat the effects of global warming

The Trillion Tree Campaign is a project which aims to plant one trillion trees worldwide. It seeks to
repopulate the world's trees and combat climate change as a nature-based solution. The project was
launched at PlantAhead 2018 in Monaco by Plant-for-the-Planet. In the fall of 2018, the project's
official website was published in order to register, monitor, and donate trees to reforestation projects
around the world. The campaign is a continuation of the activities of the earlier Billion Tree
Campaign, instigated by Wangari Maathai, who founded the Green Belt Movement in Africa in 1977.

Plant for Pakistan (Plant4Pakistan), also known as 10 Billion Tree Tsunami, is a five-year project
to plant 10 billion trees across Pakistan from 2018 to 2023. Prime Minister Imran Khan kicked off the
drive on 2 September 2018 with approximately 1.5 million trees planted on the first day The
campaign was based on the successful Billion Tree Tsunami campaign of the former Pakistan
Tehreek-e-Insaf government, also led by Imran Khan, in the province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in
2014.
In 2020, the program tripled its number of workers to 63,600 after being momentarily halted following
the coronavirus pandemic, aiming to enlist those left unemployed by its economic consequences.
Most of the work, which pays between 500-800 rupees a day, takes place in rural areas, with people
setting up nurseries, planting saplings, and serving as forest protection guards. The plan was
awarded 7.5 billion rupees in funding.[5]
Saplings planted during the initiative included mulberry, acacia, moringa and other indigenous
species.
In the short time it had, the forest department could not have completed or done what the political
party had pledged, all on its own.
The model adopted for the BTTAP became a business involving local communities. "We were able
to complete the project in August 2017, ahead of time!" said Malik Amin Aslam, who is currently
federal minister and Climate Change Advisor to Imran Khan, who became the country’s prime 
minister in 2018.
"The cost was estimated to be 22 billion Pakistani rupees and it was completed at Rs14 billion , an
anomaly for a government-funded project, which usually go over budget," pointed out Aslam, who
was the force behind the initiative. In less than three years, 1.18 billion trees were grown.
The four-pronged strategy employed included planting new trees and regenerating existing forests;
ensuring a high level of transparency; making this a people-centred programme; and taking on the
powerful timber "mafia" or the illegal loggers.
According to Aslam, who also serves as Global Vice President of the International Union for
Conservation of Nature (IUCN(link is external)), sixty per cent of the billion-tree target was reached
by "natural regeneration through community-managed protection of the forests". These forests were
divided into about 4,000 enclosures, with the communities given the incentive of collecting dead
wood. They also benefited from green jobs as forest nigehbans, or community-assigned guards, who
protected the enclosures from grazing, fire and the illegal felling of trees.
The remaining forty per cent target was achieved by employing a public-private model of shared
revenues and growth – like the nurseries being tended by Bibi and others. The government was also
able to extricate nearly 3,000 hectares of its land from encroachers.
The project was lauded both nationally and internationally. The World Wildlife Fund for Nature-
Pakistan was tasked with carrying out an independent annual performance audit of the BTTAP. 
Hammad Naqi Khan, Director General of WWF-Pakistan, said the project was "a good step in the
right direction".
When the PTI formed the federal government in August 2018, the party decided to expand the
project nationwide by planting 10 billion trees.
Terming it an "upscaled" version of the BTTAP, Aslam said it was, by nature, quite different, as it
dealt with more diverse ecological zones, different terrains and different managerial models for tree
plantations.
"The 10-billion-tree tsunami (BTT) is a much more complex endeavor, as it traverses diverse
landscapes and forestry models across six regions – from mangroves to plantation blocks to natural
reserves and urban forestation," he explained. Having battled and won against illegal loggers in KP,
the authorities are ready to confront the land "mafia" in Punjab "to make space for forests to thrive,"
And they are already walking the talk. An hour's drive from Lahore, at Balloki, in Punjab province, the
government has succeeded in extricating state-owned land from those illegally occupying it. They
have turned it into a nature reserve covering 1,011 hectares. Using legal channels, the government
aims to recover twenty years of rent arrears for illegal use of the land from eighty politicians
and landlords. It also plans to drive out encroachers from the riverine forests and wetlands along the
River Indus, soon.