“It’s one thing to plant a tree, it’s another to make it survive,” said Wangari Maathai, who founded Kenya’s Green Party in 1987 and focused on planting trees to address the wood fuel crisis here. Maathai said the campaign is meant to inspire ordinary citizens to help the environment.

“This something that anybody can do,” Maathai said Wednesday at the U.N. conference on climate change, which has drawn delegates from more than 100 countries to Kenya.

Scientists blame the past century’s 1-degree rise in average global temperatures at least in part on the accumulation of carbon dioxide, methane and other heat-trapping greenhouse gases in the atmosphere byproducts of power plants, automobiles and other fossil fuel burners.

The tree-planting project, organized by the United Nations Environment Program, shows that “action does not need to be confined to the corridors of the negotiation halls,” said Achem Steiner, UNEP’s executive director. The project calls on participants including individuals, schools and governments to sign up on UNEP’s Web site and register the trees they planted.