98 Million Trees and Counting

Many of you might have heard of Ecosia before, but I still thought it would be a great story to share on this blog. If you haven't heard of it, Ecosia is a web search engine that uses its profits to finance tree planting projects around the world.

Just like various footprint-tracking apps, Ecosia believes reforestation is one of the top solutions to deal with climate change. Research such as a study published in 2020 has tried to quantify how many more trees could still be planted around the world, while still excluding agricultural and urban areas. Their result is that there is room for 517 billion more trees, which would capture at least two-thirds of the 300 gigatons of carbon in the atmosphere.

An incredibly detailed report (also from 2020) by the Project Drawdown breaks down how and to what extent different solutions affect emissions. For instance, when describing ideas concerning land use, they show that in the area of protecting and restoring ecosystems, tropical rainforest reforestation can sequester between 54 and 85 gigatons (minimum and maximum scenario) of CO2 equivalents between 2020 and 2050. In contrast, coastal wetlands protection accounts for only about 0.4 gigatons of CO2 equivalents. Another huge advantage of reforestation over other methods such as direct air capture of CO2, is that forests and woods have countless positive externalities, like providing a habitat for protected animals and being a very low-tech, and thus largely scalable solution.

So, coming back to Ecosia. Founded only 11 years ago, at the time of writing this climate action-search engine has planted more than 98 million trees around the world. In a very transparent manner, they give a detailed breakdown of what their revenue is used for each month and you can even check out to which individual projects the money was sent to. Naturally, there are people at Ecosia that manage the tree planting. In fact, the so-called "tree planting officers" give regular updates on what the latest projects and developments are. Since 2015, Ecosia has increased its monthly financed trees from 200.000 to 7 million and uses about 50% of its income for this, the rest going to taxes, operational costs and reserves that are invested in sustainability certified projects.

I found this a very cool example of a venture that taps right into one of our now most basic daily habits: making web searches. So, by using the Ecosia extension on your search engine or by downloading the mobile phone app, you can really make a difference just by using the internet!