Berlin-based search engine Ecosia donates 80% of the income it generates from sponsored links to save the Earth by helping plant a tree every 26 seconds. The remaining 20% of their income is used to neutralize CO2 emissions from its web searches, and to meet its expenses.
Between December 2009 and August 2013, Ecosia supported a rainforest project run by WWF in Brazil’s Amazonas region with a total of $1,623,651. From August 2013 until December 2014, it supported The Nature Conservancy’s Plant a Billion Trees program. As of January 1, 2015 it is working with Belgian-based WeForest and Entrepreneurs Without Borders to plant trees in Burkina Faso, Africa. Their total contribution to the environment till date is – $4,388,695.
“Thanks to sponsored links, search engines earn billions every year. Ecosia believes that there is a more eco-friendly way of using these huge profits and that the money should better be used to fight global warming,” said its founder Christian Kroll. The trees planted by the Plant a Billion Trees campaign will capture atmospheric carbon equivalent to the emissions of one million cars every year.
“Each search with Ecosia will protect a piece of rainforest, so by making Ecosia your search engine you can actually help the environment one search at a time. An average Internet user can protect about 2,000 square metres of rainforest every year by using Ecosia – this is about the size of an ice hockey field. If only 1% of global Internet users accessed Ecosia for their web searches, we could save a rainforest area as big as Switzerland each year,” a spokesman for WWF told The Guardian.
Ecosia gives at least 80% of its surplus income to help improve the climate and makes lives better in the Africa region. Planting trees in Burkina Faso is cost-effective – .28 EUR per tree instead of one USD in Brazil. As part of its vision to end deforestation, Ecosia wants to plant one billion new trees by 2020; it has already planted just under 2.5 million trees.
Ecosia’s tree planting projects will also make up part of the Great Green Wall, a plan to re-green a coast-to-coast strip of Africa. Backed by the World Bank and the African Union, this initiative has the potential to revolutionize the ecological and socioeconomic face of the continent.
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