By Milcah Mathias and Pempho Nkhoma

Blantyre, February 10, Mana: Blantyre-based football team, Chilobwe United Football Club on Monday planted 1,000 trees at Soche Hill in Blantyre to restore the environment and combat climate change impacts including devastating floods that affected the community in the past.

Speaking after the tree planting exercise, Chilobwe United FC Public Relations Officer, Julio Chimbuzi said that being a community team they have various social responsibility projects including community environmental conservation and charity works.

“Our theme for this year is ‘where football meets community impact’ which means everything we are doing is attached to the community. We saw it fit to take up the initiative of planting trees on this hill because our area was heavily affected by Cyclone Freddy,” he said.

Chimbuzi, who is also the Events Manager for the team, added that they will continue to look after the trees by implementing safeguarding initiatives.

“We have been given this area and have named it after our team; we are calling it Chilobwe United Forest. We will be coming to take care of the forest and make sure that as the team is growing, the trees are protected,” he added.

Soche Mountain Conservation Trust Field Officer, Sean Gondwe commended Chilobwe United for the initiative saying that it has complemented their work of restoring and conserving Soche Mountain.

“We thank Chilobwe United for planting 1000 trees. It means they have saved more than 1000 lives, and the same trees will protect the coming generation from natural disasters,” he said.

Gondwe therefore advised other organisations and community members to consider protecting already existing trees, citing that conserving the environment is not only about planting new trees.

“If we take good care of already existing trees, after five years they will be more useful than these new ones. Most of the time, we focus on planting trees forgetting that already existing trees are equally important,” Gondwe added.

Chilobwe United FC was last season’s Southern Region Betika Division 1 League Champions and was promoted to Thumbs Up Southern Region Premier Division League