Telangana's Net Zero Mission: Undertaking Plantation of 340 Million Trees
Pledge by
Telangana's Department of Environment, Forests, Science and Technology
Pioneering Telangana towards its net-zero ambitions through strategic initiatives that encompass sustainable urban development, large-scale plantation (planting 340 million in next 2 years, i.e., 2025-26), ecosystem restoration, the electrification of mobility and the advancement of renewable energy solutions
- Type
- Restoring & Growing, Enabling
- This pledge will take place from
- 2020 to beyond 2030
Pledge overview
Telangana’s Commitment to Net-Zero Emissions by 2050
Telangana is firmly committed to achieving net-zero emissions by 2050. As a central pillar of its net-zero strategy and the 'Future City' initiative on nature-positive and sustainable urban development, Telangana has placed natural ecosystem restoration at its core. This integrated approach fosters collaboration among state government departments, corporations, academia, and changemakers to create a cohesive ecosystem for climate action across India, advancing broader sustainability goals.
A comprehensive set of initiatives have been designed to transform the state’s environmental and industrial landscape. Key actions include:
(1) Large-scale plantation initiatives to restore natural ecosystems: Aims to plant 340 million trees between 2025 and 2026, prioritizing the restoration of degraded ecosystems with native, biodiverse species across all districts. This initiative builds on the state's remarkable achievement of planting approximately 1.23 billion trees between 2020 and 2024 and will include ongoing maintenance of both existing and new plantations.
(2) Facilitating sustainable urban development: To promote sustainable urban development, the state will relocate polluting industries outside city limits, undertake large-scale lake restoration, and implement rainwater harvesting projects to improve water security and enhance ecological resilience.
(3) Adoption of Electric Mobility: As part of its efforts to advance electric mobility, Telangana will facilitate the transition from internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles to electric vehicles (EVs). A robust infrastructure, including charging and battery-swapping stations, will be developed to support this transition.
(4) Renewable energy integration: The state will integrate renewable energy policies, including the recently launched Clean and Green Energy Policy to power energy-intensive industries like data centers, ensuring they operate on green energy. Additionally, new industrial parks will adopt natural gas as a cleaner energy alternative to further reduce emissions.
These initiatives will help conserve and restore ecosystems, reduce emissions, and improve air and water quality, contributing to the collective goal of conserving, restoring, and growing 1 trillion trees by 2030.
Actions in this pledge
-
Restoring and growing trees and forest landscapes
Supporting actions
- Assisted natural regeneration
- Actions that support natural regeneration without tree planting, such as Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration, forest soil remediation, exotic species control, disease prevention, and wildfire protection
- Reforestation
- Re-establishment of forest through planting and/or deliberate seeding on land classified as forest, that has been degraded or where trees are unlikely to regenerate naturally
- Agroforestry
- Activities that establish and manage the integration of trees into agricultural landscapes, silvopastoral systems, farming in forests and along forest margins and tree-crop production
- Urban tree planting
- Planting and maintaining trees within urban areas
Additional details
The Telangana state government has placed the restoration of natural ecosystems at the core of its strategy to achieve its Net Zero emissions goal by 2050.
In addition to forest restoration, Telangana is also envisioning a groundbreaking project - a “Future City” near Hyderabad. This proposed development aims to be pollution-free, net-zero in emissions, and oriented toward the services sector, competing with global cities such as New York, London, Seoul, Tokyo, and Dubai.
Hyderabad itself has been transformed into a city capable of managing natural disasters effectively, with new initiatives underway to further reduce pollution. Efforts include promoting electric vehicles and rejuvenating water bodies through the Musi Rejuvenation Project, enhancing the city’s ecological resilience and livability.
These initiatives underscore Telangana’s leadership in sustainable development and its commitment to building a greener, more resilient future.
The mechanisms to monitor and report on the progress of restoration activities can be found here.
This hierarchy ensures a multi-layered approach to monitoring, integrating state leadership, regional supervision, local implementation, and technological support for maximum efficiency and transparency.
Restoring & Growing
- Trees
- 340 million
-
Enabling activities for trees and forest landscapes
Supporting actions
- Nursery and seedling development
- Establish tree nurseries, including actions such as identification and collection of seeds and/or growing seedlings
- Sustainable forest management
- Activities that support the stewardship and use of forests (including by local communities and indigenous peoples), to maintain their biological diversity, productivity, and regeneration capacity, as well as their potential to fulfil relevant ecological economic and social functions
- Market development for sustainable forest products
- Activities that create markets and demand for ecologically and socially responsible timber and non-timber forest and agroforestry products, e.g. capacity-building for the harvesting and processing of agroforestry products, forest certification standards, etc.
- Education and capacity building
- Forest / tree species conservation and restoration education programmes, targeted educational and behaviour change campaigns, training and capacity building, including promotion of local and traditional knowledge and practices
- Community mobilisation
- Community mobilisation and engagement activities for conservation, restoration and reforestation, including enabling systems of community governance, etc.
- Youth engagement
- Engagement of young people and/or youth networks to catalyse a restoration generation
- Land, community rights & enabling institutional frameworks
- Activities that support land rights, resolve land tenure conflicts, support indigenous people’s rights, and other institutional and policy measures that support and facilitate conservation and restoration
- Data collection, management and technological tools
- Activities that provide data and/or technological tools to support conservation and restoration (e.g. monitoring etc.)
- Financial innovation
- Activities that create additional financial opportunities and incentives for conservation, restoration and reforestation (e.g. blended financing vehicles, etc.)
Additional details
The mechanisms to monitor and report on the progress of enabling activities can be found here.
This hierarchy ensures a multi-layered approach to monitoring, integrating state leadership, regional supervision, local implementation, and technological support for maximum efficiency and transparency.
Enabling
Our ecologically and socially responsible approach
Ecologically and socially responsible implementation will be integrated in our pledged activities.
Our partners
While all activities will be funded by the department, partnerships with CSR foundations or corporate initiatives are encouraged to enhance the impact of these efforts across the state. The department welcomes collaboration with the private sector to scale up conservation and restoration efforts as part of their CSR initiatives.
Our locations
We are working at locations across Telangana including rural, urban and tribal areas.
The process of identifying intervention locations begins with state departments setting annual tree plantation targets aligned with restoration goals. Officials carefully select appropriate seedlings, such as flood-resistant species, and apply innovative techniques like the Miyawaki method to optimize biodiversity and ecosystem recovery. Selected sites that are degraded and need restoration and then they are registered and monitored online using geotags, ensuring transparency and progress tracking. By making these sites publicly accessible, the process fosters collaboration, enabling private sector participation through CSR initiatives to amplify restoration efforts.