AKIPRESS.COM - In the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, 800,000 volunteers helped plant 50 million trees on Monday, hoping to shatter a world record and help their country deal with climate change, Christian Science Monitor reports.

Volunteers in India’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, may have set records on Monday through their effort to plant a massive 50 million trees in 24 hours. Uttar Pradesh leadership was upfront about its desire to break a Guinness World Record with the feat.

While this reforestation initiative is just one tiny part of India’s ongoing efforts to meet its commitments under the international climate agreement forged in Paris late last year, experts say it could be indicative of progress on India’s major climate change goals.

“This initiative can be a step towards progress on some level,” says Edward Parson, an environmental law professor at the University of California at Los Angeles, in a phone interview with The Christian Science Monitor, “but it is at best a small contribution to India’s greater climate commitments.”

India’s national government has also inaugurated several progressive programs designed to tackle some of the country’s biggest climate issues in recent years, including a solar program intended to help wean India off of coal, one of the country’s biggest, and dirtiest, energy sources.

Still, human development remains one of the country’s highest priorities, meaning that at some point, the country is going to have to actually expand its energy use, a move that would appear to counter India’s stated interest in meeting its energy goals.

“Poverty eradication and social and economic development are first and over-riding priorities,” said Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh in 2009.

Experts also say that in order to have the most impact, tree-planting projects will need to be coordinated at a national level.

“There are a lot of benefits from a project like this,” said Ankur Desai, a professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “But for it to be most effective, it requires a certain level of coordinated effort.”

It will likely take the Guinness Book of World Records up to two months to verify whether the tree-planting project has broken the world record.