We did not want this campaign to be a one-time thing. We want to make it a mainstay among other national customs, the activities of uniformed services, scouts, but above all in the customs of the President of the Republic of Poland, claimed the President of the Republic of Poland Andrzej Duda.

“Polish foresters do a great deal of work for Polish nature by planting 500 million trees every year. Thanks to their efforts, the area of forests in Poland is constantly growing and today it amounts to almost 30% of the whole country,” claimed the Minister of Environment Henryk Kowalczyk.

Forests are indispensable – both as ecosystems that have an effect on air quality and a factor mitigating climate change, as well as the source of the most ecological raw material, added Vice-Minister Małgorzata Golińska.

The inaugural ceremony of the #sadziMy campaign took place in the area of the Jakubowo Forest Inspectorate in the Rytel Forest District. More than a thousand people – including public administration employees, scouts, soldiers of the Polish Army and the Territorial Defence Force, officers of the State and Voluntary Fire Service, Border Guards, employees of the State Forests, students of forest schools – met to plant 300,000 trees over the course of two days, which will grow and make up 100 hectares of the new generation of forest.

The hurricane of the century

In the night of 11-12 August 2017, a strong wind, reaching a speed of 150 km/h in gusts, broke and felled millions of trees covering an area of about 70,000 hectares, along the belt of land starting in Lower Silesia, running through Greater Poland, Kuyavia and Kashubia. The Rytel Forest District suffered the most, with 2/3 of its area destroyed. Two girls died in a scout camp near the village of Suszek, when pine trees fell on them.

Thanks to the efforts of the State Forests, more than 90 percent of the entire area after the natural disaster has been cleared. More than 1,200 foresters and nearly 4,000 employees of several hundred private forest service companies, as well as more than 1,000 various forestry machines and vehicles were used for this project. This year, the clean-up phase will finally come to an end. In the coming years, foresters will plant a total of nearly 220 million new trees in the stricken areas. Estimated costs incurred by the State Forests for cleaning up and renewal of the disaster area will amount to approximately 1.5 billion PLN in 2017-2024.

The #sadziMy campaign

As part of the #sadziMy campaign, 430 forest districts throughout Poland provided seedlings to people who wanted to plant a tree on their own. More than 100,000 seedlings were distributed that day.