People in This Country Are Urged to Plant One Billion Trees to Preserve the Mountain Ice Cap
Published July 25 2025, 11:45 a.m. ET

(L) Mount Kilimanjaro (Representative Cover Image Source: Getty Images | Ayzenstayn) | (R) People planting trees on Kilimanjaro
Fear is a piece of information that signals that something is wrong and something needs to be done about it. These days, a recurring fear lingers in the minds of Tanzanians because their sacred mountain beast is teetering on the edge of collapse. Mount Kilimanjaro, the 19,341-foot behemoth, often immortalized in poetry and stories, could be gone by 2050, per UN News. The cause is, as you might have already guessed, climate change.

Mount Kilimanjaro from Kenya
Just three degrees South of the equator, Kibo ice cap, the poster child of global climate change, is already starved of snowfall and bombarded with sizzling solar radiation, says American Scientist. The tree-lined slopes are slowly becoming treeless, and the dormant volcanoes are just hardened cones of lava and ash. Kilimanjaro is dying. And so, people of Tanzania have been called upon to plant at least one billion trees to protect it.
If a psychologist could see the feelings of Kilimanjaro, one of the highest freestanding mountain peaks, they would probably report that it is crying. Driven by whipping solar winds that lash upon its snowy blanket, crumbling it apart and agitate its icy caverns to rise into vapor, the mountain is slowly departing. And humans residing around it have already taken the call, the call to never let it go.