How to plant trees, without lifting a finger

It appears to be common knowledge (to most anyway) that planting more trees is a pretty good idea.  They are not only beautiful, they can produce ‘free food’ of fruit and nuts, they can help with air quality and overheating when planted in towns and cities, they are sometimes planted in areas to avoid downstream flooding, and of course they are often used, because their carbon dioxide uptake, as a way of tackling climate change. Planting trees is a great idea, but we haven’t all got the space, time or money to do so.

Did you know that there is a way to plant trees without moving from your cosy armchair and without spending a penny?  Ecosia is a web search engine that anyone can use. The company is based in Germany and it makes money through advertising as do all search engine companies, the difference is that 80% of the ‘surplus income’ is given to tree planting, not-for-profit, conservation organisations.  Currently Ecosia funds a tree planting every 2 seconds, it receives money from the advertisers everytime someone clicks on an advert through the site.  However, you do not have to click on adverts to earn Ecosia money, you can help just by using it, because the more people who use it, the more valuable it becomes to their advertising partners and so it can charge more per advert.  So if you want to feel good about yourself even whilst you are just surfing the web, start using Ecosia and get more trees planted!

If you have got a bit of money to spend on planting a tree, but don’t want to go out and get muddy doing it, here is another way.  Tree Nation is an innovative scheme, using social media to incentivise tree planting, it funds tree planting projects around the world.
You can:

• Choose your type of tree
• Choose where you want to plant it,
• Receive a ‘virtual tree’ (which is like a social media page)
• Personalise your ‘virtual tree’ and share it on social media.  
• Receive information on your real tree.
• Buy a tree for someone as a present

And companies might be interested in the Carbon offsetting and good publicity received for donating to such a scheme.

 

If you are interested in offsetting the carbon you create when you are going on your travels, Mossy Earth is a social enterprise that helps you calculate your CO2 output and then offsets it with tree planting schemes throughout europe.  They photograph and map each tree they plant,  and it can make a great present for the person who already has everything.

These are certainly not the only such schemes around,  you could try 8 Billion Trees  a brand new social enterprise that plants 10 trees a month for a 20 dollar monthly subscription through supporting tree planting projects throughout the world.  Or there is MyTree who also have many projects one of which is to plant trees in the Nord Pas-de-Calais region of France.  And another scheme called Treedom again they have a wide range of tree planting projects one of which is in Italy, redeveloping seized mafia assets by encouraging organic farming. 

You can see that there are many ways of planting trees without getting muddy, so the next time you feel like you want to make the world a better place, do it, you don’t have to look much further than your computer screen.


Links:
www.ecosia.org
www.tree-nation.com
www.mossy.earth
www.8billiontrees.com
www.outdoorconservation.eu/twomilliontrees