Ecosia is a German search engine company which donates 80% of its revenue to planting trees. They take Bing, reskin it, and spend the profits from advertising on planting trees. They’re up to about 175,000,000 trees so far.
https://info.ecosia.org/what?_sp=c00c1905-82ee-49a9-a802-904ebfaef758
Edit: This is just a convenient way to turn something you do every day (use a search engine) into a force for good. It’s a slow process, 1 tree ≈ 45 searches, but you were going to make those searches anyway, might as well plant trees! Think of it as the digital equivalent of buying local food.
Planting trees doesn’t save forests! The trees planted are often monocultures and serve as a means for companies to buy carbon credits, allowing them to pollute at will 💀
Ecosia doesn’t plant monoculture plantations. They work with locals to manage the forests and use locally native trees to rebuild them. They also focus on areas where they can make the biggest difference. You can see that if you scroll down a bit on ecosia.org, it’s their second bullet point.
They’re really transparent as well, they show their revenue and break it down.
They also invest (money not included in the 80%) on things like building renewable energy.
While this is unfortunately often true, this isn’t the case for Ecosia!
I am linking a video explaining why plantations are not a good substitute for actual forests, that became popular on Reddit a month or two ago.
A perfectly valid concern! As far as I can tell, Ecosia only works with projects that actually improve things.
https://blog.ecosia.org/tag/where-does-ecosia-plant-trees/?_sp=c00c1905-82ee-49a9-a802-904ebfaef758
E.G.
Beautiful! Glad I stand corrected