ECOSIA SEARCH ENGINE REVIEW FREE

We believe trees only stay standing if they have an economic benefit directly or indirectly for the local people. We try to plant trees that will have as much of an impact as possible we want to make sure they aren’t just planted but will have a benefit for the local people and nature. All the tree planting is on community land, never private land.

We try not to plant natural forests as that would be just a drop in the ocean and wouldn’t give economic opportunities to the community. We try to focus on biodiversity hotspots areas with a lot of biodiversity but that’s heavily threatened.

Also the price of a surviving tree needs to be very low, and the benefits of planting that tree need to be very high. We have lots of criteria for each project with basic requirements like no child labor, no monocultures. So we finance the planting and in return we want proof and to make sure they meet our standards, not just for planting the trees but also taking care of them and any workers involved in the projects. We have 20 project partners, mostly in developing countries in the tropics - a lot in Africa, South America and Indonesia and usually NGOs who have been planting already for a while. But there’s lots of room for us to grow we have less than 1% market share and plenty of degraded land to plant on. It’s our ambition to plant 1 trillion trees to help prevent a climate change catastrophe, which sounds like a big number but if we had just 15% of the revenue of Google, we could do that in 20 years. The more users we have, the more trees we can plant. It took us four years to plant the first million trees, then we reached 25 million under a year ago, and we might even reach 100 million this year. At that time, the power of Google was already very obvious, and clearly making a lot of money through advertising, so I thought a search engine was a really interesting way to help people and the planet. It became obvious to me that I wanted to do something to help combat that. I spent most of my year away in Nepal and Argentina and I observed a lot of environmental problems, poverty, and global injustice. I had just finished university where I did business administration and I wanted to build a business that was about more than just making money but had a purpose. You’ll see a little counter of how many trees your searches have planted – I am at 153 after two weeks.) Where did the idea for Ecosia come from?īefore I started the company in 2009, I did a trip around the world.

ECOSIA SEARCH ENGINE REVIEW FREE

(You can start using Ecosia straight away here and can add it as a free extension to your browser. We caught up with Kroll to find out more about how Ecosia started and its plans to promote sustainable agriculture practices as well. One of those partners is the Jane Goodall Institute of the renowned conservationist who is working to restore forest in Uganda, the natural habitat for chimpanzees. The startup partners with various projects globally to plant trees in locations where they can benefit the local economy and therefore positively contribute to communities, often agriculturally. It sounds unachievable, but it is the equivalent of 10% of the world’s annual military spend.” We need to change the way we eat, the way we farm, the way we generate our energy – we also need to plant a trillion trees. However, the reality is that it is not enough. “Climate change is a very real threat and if we’re to stop the world heating above the 1.5 degrees warned about in the IPCC report, we need to plant trees at scale,” he wrote in a statement. “People now use Ecosia in 183 countries and we’re really excited that users have helped us plant 50 million trees. Growth for the startup, which started operations in 2009, has grown exponentially - particularly in its home country of Germany - as consumer concern about climate change increases, and the company is on track to reach 100 million trees planted by the end of 2019, according to the founder Christian Kroll. After covering its internal costs, everything left goes towards planting trees Ecosia is a non-profit organization. This equates to the removal of 2.5 million tonnes of Co2 from the atmosphere, according to the company.Īnd Ecosia is now planting a tree every second in Kenya, Brazil, Indonesia, Spain, Tanzania, Madagascar, Colombia, Peru, Senegal, Burkina Faso, Haiti, Morocco, Ethiopia, Uganda, Ghana and Nicaragua with the profits it makes from advertisements on its search engine.Įcosia has partnered with Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, to get results for users, but receives a majority portion of any revenues. Ecosia, a German startup with an internet search engine, today, has brought in enough revenues to enable it to plant 50 million trees.

Ecosia search engine review