Plant Trees While Searching The Web With Ecosia
As you probably know, search engines like Google get most of their income through advertisement and "search results placement" (you can read more about this here). But what if there was a search engine donating 80% of this income to ambient-related projects? Actually there is: meet Ecosia.
Resulting from a partnership between a German group, Bing, Yahoo! and the non-governmental organization The Nature Conservancy, the main idea behind Ecosia is to use web searches to plant trees and help the environment in other ways.
Ecosia managers state that they plant a new tree every 60 seconds. They do so by donating 80% of their advertising income to The Nature Conservancy's "Plant A Billion Trees" program. This program aims to restore the severely endangered Amazon Rainforest by planting one billion native trees. Deforestation in Brazil has been increasing, around 28% just this year, so Ecosia's mission assumes yet a bigger importance in this moment.
In the past 15 weeks, Ecosia has planted almost 130,000 trees. According to its founder, Christian Kroll, Ecosia has «2.5 million users worldwide» and «if Ecosia had as many users as Google, we could have the chance to end deforestation once and for all».
Not only Ecosia helps reforestation, it also neutralizes all CO2 emissions caused by searches in its engine, including output from their servers, their offices, the electronic devices utilized by the users and more. In addition, Ecosia also likes to keep things fully transparent, so they publish the monthly donation receipts, which can be found here.
Ecosia's actual model is a really innovative one. If you would like to check other innovative sites and organizations, click here. We all use search engines, so why not stick to one that really makes a difference in the outside world while getting you the results we need? Share the word, share Ecosia and let's plant some trees.
Diogo Costa • International Innovations