Fancy planting trees while searching the net? Switch to ECOSIA!

Hi! Happy Easter everyone! Hopefully, you are celebrating with your family, in your own home, enjoying some chocolate eggs.

As regards me, I will go back to Rome, my home city, soon. Indeed, at the beginning of December 2019, after an internship in the Italian Headquarters of Bioversity International, IO focusing on research about agricultural biodiversity, I moved to Sintra, in Portugal. Here, I took part in an environmental preservation’s project, volunteering for the NGO Plantar Uma Árvore, in the context of Volunteer Escapes, promoted by the European Solidarity Corps.  Here’s their website, if you want to have a look at what they’re doing http://www.plantarumaarvore.org

The tasks carried out have been many: mainly, organizing activities with the community, families, privates, companies and other organizations in order to raise awareness about the importance of promoting and preserving the environment for the present and future generations, by restoring ecologically degraded areas. Among the most relevant actions, a big contribution is given by the commitment to reforestation: during the last planting season, around 17 thousand plants have been planted all over Portugal by Plantar Uma Árvore’s coordinators, volunteers and other participants. Surely, it takes many years to know if these plants have actually survived their first months, have grown healthy and are now contributing to offset carbon emissions, while providing oxygen and improving biodiversity for ecosystems. But it is a very great beginning. The organization has been active for 10 years, so results start to be now more visible and quantifiable.

Me and my friends from the project, trying to help the planet, while enjoying the view of the Parques de Sintra

Nature plays a regulating and supporting role: sometimes, because of a lack of tools/measures, we don’t give the right value to trees or to the services that nature provides. While taking part in this experience, I realized how relevant it is to plant trees: it represents one of the cheapest solutions to tackle climate change. Also, trees prevent soil degradation, clean the air from pollutants, reducing CO2 levels in the air. 

So, I wondered: what if someone wants to contribute but doesn’t have the opportunity to physically and practically get involved?

Fortunately, there is a solution which works even in these difficult times when we are obliged to stay at home. In fact, this solution belongs to the internet industry: ECOSIA, German SME founded in 2009, is a search engine which plants trees with its advertising revenues, with the aim to reach 1 billion trees planted by 2020.

First and foremost, it invests 80% of its own profits in planting trees, wherever they are needed, mostly in the global south, generating high-level impact results. It helps to make landscapes greener: on average, 45 searches are usually needed to plant a tree. Even if an ad blocker is used or the user never clicks on ads, there is still a contribution to the movement by increasing the number of ECOSIA users. The more monthly active users ECOSIA has, the more relevant it becomes to advertisers.

There is a legitimate question that would come to mind: is it really better to use ECOSIA rather than other search engines like Google? You can consider the fact that Google doesn’t plant trees but it uses 100% of renewable energy to power its data centers (you can find these numbers at https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/renewable/ ), so I would still consider it a legit way of searching the net. 

But what about ECOSIA? It does not only plant trees: rather than “carbon neutral”, this business can be defined as “carbon negative”! In fact, it built its own solar plants, making possible for all searches to be powered by 100% renewable energy. Even better: in 2019, it became the first company to produce twice as much solar power as needed to power all of its searches. It managed to take responsibility for its ecological footprint and act accordingly in the best efficient way. 

Also, it is transparent when it comes to financial reports and the way money is invested. It has a social impact, besides the environmental one: trees benefit people and local economies as well. Many projects are run in areas affected by deforestation, involving training of farmers in forest management and sustainable harvesting: damaged areas are restored, empowering rural communities.

It plays a key role in enabling actors, like simple citizen carrying out an everyday activity such as searching the web, to contribute to a green economy.

Martina Forbicini

Over 15 million active users (I am one of them) decided to switch to this environmentally friendly search engine: are you already using Ecosia? Or do you prefer other search engines? And why?

Let us know in the comments!

*All the data published in this article, regarding ECOSIA, can be found in its official website https://www.ecosia.org/. ECOSIA is a certified B Corporation, meeting "rigorous standards of social and environmental performance, accountability, and transparency."