After the government's recent tree planting exercise I began to wonder if Malaysians understand why there is a real need to plant trees besides being part of something quite as silly as setting a Malaysian record.

Do many even begin to question why there is there so much indiscriminate logging in our precious rainforests and how will planting one million saplings help?

There is, of course, a real reason why we should all plant some trees and ensure that those trees are nurtured and well taken care off to help offset our carbon emissions.

In an ideal world there would be zero carbon dioxide emissions but because we do not live in an ideal world, everything we do create carbon dioxide. This includes breathing, doing simple housework chores, driving our cars and running our air-conditioners.

Whether we are individual citizens, households or giant multi-national corporations, carbon dioxide (CO2) is produced as we go about our daily lives.

Carbon dioxide makes up a large part of the greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming. Trees play an important role in this equation - they process this carbon dioxide and release oxygen as a by-product.

And we all know how important oxygen is, don't we?

Guzzling planes

The simple process of planting trees to counter-balance or neutralize our carbon emissions is called carbon sequestration. Carbon sequestration through tree planting is a precious tool in tackling global warming while attacking carbon emissions at the source.

To put things into perspective, let's take a look at air travel. It takes an incredulous 350 tonnes (one tonne is approximately 1,000kg) of fuel to fly a plane for 12 hours. Air travel is estimated to double every 15 years which means by the year 2050, air travel will account for 15 percent of the world's carbon emissions.

As it is, each year, aircraft release a damaging 600 million tonnes of CO2. If you fly from London to New York, or from Kuala Lumpur to Sydney, your plane has caused two tonnes of fuel to be burned.

Planting just one single tree will offset the CO2 produced by one individual's long haul flight (based on the absorption of CO2 over the tree's life span).

On the other hand, to fully neutralize each car owner's carbon emission, each driver must plant five trees a year! Imagine the damage that we're causing by all the CO2 producing activities that we undertake every day!

I'm sure not many Malaysians, or the rest of our Planet Earth's population for that matter, have planted even a single tree within the last few years. It is no wonder then, there is global warming.

We need more than a million

A simple mathematical calculation has shown that each Malaysian citizen must plant two trees a year to fully neutralise our carbon emissions as a nation.

So now, let's do a wee bit more maths shall we? We have a population of approximately 22 million. This means we should be planting at least 44 million trees per year, not just one million per millennium!

I also should mention that experts assume that for every five trees planted, only one will survive. That means our aforementioned record-setting effort has been reduced to just 200,000 trees that hopefully will survive long enough to be of any use in cleaning up our environment.

In other words, as global citizens, we have just planted enough trees to neutralize the carbon emissions of only 100,000 Malaysians for the next 12 months.

While I pray for the day when the logging industry is made to pay heavily for the extensive damage they've done, I hope Malaysians will have a clearer understanding of the damage that we do as individuals.

If you can't plant a tree yourself, there are organizations overseas who are willing to plant trees on your behalf (for a small fee, of course). But one can also strive to practise small and simple steps to help safeguard our environment.

These include boiling water with the lid or cover on, walking and car pooling whenever possible, keeping car tyres properly inflated as under-inflated tyres use more energy and allowing hot food to cool before refrigeration.

We all need to do our part, no matter how small. And we need to start doing it now.

BEATRICE THIO is a typical Malaysian who loves her country and its beautiful flora, fauna and peoples but is occasionally plagued with bouts of lethargic indifference, laziness and frustration. She is passionate about wildlife conservation and the environment and a firm disbeliever in 'the grass is always greener beyond the fence'. She is however a firm believer in 'living simply so that others may simply live'.