Deforestation is currently occurring globally. Forests and trees are being destroyed world-wide due to a large amount of logging, and more recently due to wildfires throughout different regions. Imagine if there was a way to help restore the forests. Imagine if there was a way to help without ever needing to leave the house, or actually get dirty digging and planting yourself. Now there is a way.
Ecosia is a search engine that uses its proceeds from ad revenue to plant trees around the world where deforestation has been most impactful. Their target countries are displayed on their website, as well as the percentage of trees that have been cut down (See image below).
Once opening the web browser, the user is greeted by a home screen that displays the number of trees that have been planted due to the search engine users. The number is on live counter so you can sit and watch the number go up, as more people search the web more and more trees are being planted (See image below).
In the upper right corner of the web browser you will notice there is a small round icon with a tree in the center of it. If you hover over this icon it will notify you of how many searches you have conducted with Ecosia as your search engine. Not only does the tree icon notify you of how many searches you have done with Ecosia, but it informs you that on average it takes around 45 searches to plant one tree (See image below). That may seem like a lot of searches for one person to do daily, but in the larger picture if you get the majority of a population to switch from their current search engines such as Bing, Google, or Yahoo, then 45 searches would be multiplied hundreds if not thousands of times. Imagine if one single office building switched their computers to all run with the Ecosia search engine. One single office could be responsible for helping to plant hundreds of trees within months.
To ensure that people have trust and good faith that Ecosia is actually putting their proceeds towards planting trees, they have fully disclosed all of their earnings and post their reports on their main website that is open to the public to view (See image below).
-Joe
