Searching for the Future Trees

How using the Ecosia search engine helps the environment.

Photo by Noah Buscher on Unsplash

Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with Ecosia in any way, I wrote this article simply because I believe in their cause and hope that more people can use it and help the environment.

Recently, Ecosia celebrated its 10th birthday. While reforestation is a movement that has only recently gotten more traction, Ecosia has been heavily invested in reforesting the world for a very long time now. While everyone is trying to donate and plant more trees, I think that Ecosia provides an even simpler method to plant trees: by searching the internet.

That’s right. Searching the internet. Ecosia is a search engine that uses its profits to plant trees around the world. Users do not have to do anything else other than to switch from Google and the likes to Ecosia when looking for what they want on the internet. As a certified B corporation, Ecosia does not only help the environment by planting trees, they look at the bigger picture and help people in local communities as well. They think about the local communities and include them in their reforestation projects, often helping improve their quality of life in the process. The local communities often benefit from the planted trees, getting more fertile land, and gaining raw materials for the creation of products that came be used or sold (shea butter and baobab powder, etc.) to name but some of the benefits. By doing so, Ecosia creates a beneficial relationship between the forest and the communities, allowing the reforested areas to be integrated into their lives and become something they want to protect.

Of course, reforestation has a myriad of obvious benefits. Trees absorb carbon from the atmosphere and help fix the water cycles in areas that are deeply affected by deforestation. The trees also provide a habitat for local animals and help prevent soil erosion. However, tree planting isn’t easy. There are many factors to be considered and Ecosia has taken many steps in ensuring that they do it correctly. They plant mixed forests instead of monocultures, and only plant trees that are local to the area. By diversifying the types of trees planted and focusing on local breeds, Ecosia ensures that the reforested areas are a suitable habitat for local animals while guaranteeing that there are no foreign invasive species introduced. Furthermore, it is also likely that local breeds of trees can survive and mature as they are adapted to suit the conditions of the local climate.

Ecosia takes things further by constantly monitoring the trees they plant and sharing their financial reports to the public, ensuring a level of transparency. They only use renewable energy (they own their own solar power plants) and generate more than enough electricity to power all the searches.

Yes, all this sounds like an advertisement for Ecosia. But, Ecosia is truly a great corporation that helps the world in a big way. Yes, maybe the engine can be improved, maybe the Ecosia app has some features lacking. But for all their tree planting projects around the world (they have projects in Brazil, Indonesia, Madagascar, Ethiopia, and many more), they really are making an impact and I hope that more people can start using Ecosia so that more trees can be planted (and so that they hit their 1 billion tree target by 2020)

As of today, Ecosia has planted more than 77,500,000 trees.