A new Guinness World Record for planting trees has been set by Ecuador over the weekend. Tens of thousands of citizens paid attention to the government’s call to plant more than 640,000 trees in a single day in almost 2,000 hectares across the country.

In 2008, Ecuador became the first country in the world to guarantee the rights of nature in the constitution. Efforts Socio Bosque conservation program and the National Reforestation Plan have been put into action though legislation.

The 2008 constitution recognizes the right of the population to live in ecologically balanced and healthy environments.

One provides incentives for citizens to not cut down trees while the other seeks to reforest 1 million hectares over a 20-year period.

In an interview with teleSUR, Minister of the Environment Lorena Tapia said that this is a symbolic act to mobilize the population. More than US$74 million dollars have been invested in a project of reforestation called Socio Bosque.

However, some environmental groups, which by and large welcomed the move, also pointed out this move will be nullified by oil drilling plans being backed by Correa in Ecuador’s Amazon rainforest region.

Correa has decided to allow oil drilling in Ecuador’s Yasuni National Park, which is a part of the Amazon rainforest. The park is me to one of Ecuador’s last indigenous communities living in voluntary isolation and one of the world’s most-biologically diverse. It also sits on hundreds of millions of barrels of oil.

Adam Zuckerman of the conservation group AmazonWatch said. “It’s great that Ecuador is planting trees, but its proposed new oil drilling would likely deforest a swath of rainforest that is nearly 100 times the size of the area where it planted saplings on Saturday”.