National Pingtung University of Science and Technology (NPUST) and Green Hope Spring Social Enterprise joined forces on Earth Day 2021 to plant some trees and put the spotlight on the environment.
Green Hope Spring, which is among the 100 largest social enterprises in Asia, is an advocate for the tree-cultivation projects. In the five years since their establishment, they have successfully promoted such projects as the “Trees for Footballs” project, the “Green Building” project and the “One Person, One Thousand Trees” project –all of which have been very well received.
For Earth Day (4/22), Green Hope Spring donated four Golden Bolly Gums trees and twenty-two of Taiwan’s nationally treasured Cinnamomum kanehirae to the university. For the occasion they paired up with the school’s Yunus Social Business Center and organized a tree planting event that emphasized a commitment to sustainable development.
NPUST President Chang-Hsien Tai, Green Hope Spring CEO Hsiu-Ching Wu, and a number of university representatives took part in a planting activity which was held at the university’s Botanical Garden.
Chang-Hsien Tai expressed his gratitude to the Yunus Social Business Center for “providing guidance and helping us to integrate the university’s features of development with the concepts promoted by Green Hope Spring. We invited officials to take part in today’s activity because we want to emphasize the importance that education plays in sustainable development—every tree we plant today will carry that significance.”
Green Hope Spring’s CEO noted that they are using a social business model “to actively promote activities related the climate. We are very grateful to all the professors and students from NPUST who took part in 422 Earth Day activity. Through this event we can get connected and allow everyone to understand that tree planting is a very simple way to solve climate problems.”
Hopes are that the activity will also help build public awareness on Climate Change and Global Warming. The simple action of response is to plant a tree—and planting trees is beneficial to the economy and to the eco-system. NPUST has a large campus area, giving it ample opportunity to cultivate greenery, but that is not the only way it is making a difference. The school’s Department of Forestry has been working on tree conservation and forest management for many years now, and Department of Wood Science and Design is continuously finding new ways to add artistic value to wood products and use waste materials to develop circular economies—with a continuous focus on sustainable development.
Nearly 300 hectares in size, NPUST’s campus is not only the largest in Taiwan, but has earned it the reputation of “National Park University”. The school has long attached importance to the goal of sustainable campus development. For their efforts they won University Social Responsibility awards from Global View Magazine in 2020 and 2021, and for the past seven years, they have been No. 1 in Taiwan on the GreenMetric University Ranking.
Although Earth Day comes and goes, the event was a good reminder of the activities that the university is invested in year-round—their pursuit of the UN’s SDGs, the development of sustainable technologies and the work to make the world cleaner and healthier. With the planting of every small sapling, we can look forward to a greener tomorrow.
