As the world’s largest not-for-profit search engine, Ecosia commits at least 80% of its profits from advertising revenue from its eponymous search engine to the planting of trees in biodiversity hotspots around the world.
Headquartered in Berlin, Germany, Ecosia uses the profit it makes from your searches to plant trees where they are needed most. Get the free browser extension and plant trees with every search.
How it works?
- You search the web with Ecosia.
- Search ads generate income for Ecosia.
- Ecosia uses this income to plant trees.
Founded by Christian Kroll in 2009, Ecosia has gone on to become the world’s largest not-for-profit search engine and has planted more than 125 million trees in over 30 countries. Over the past 10 years, its team of reforestation experts has built up a diversified and highly effective tree-planting portfolio that restores and protects most of the world’s biodiversity hotspots and holistically affects multiple Sustainable Development Goals. Trees are monitored for at least three years using innovative satellite and geo-tagging technology, to ensure they not only grow, but survive and thrive. All Ecosia Trees partners will receive comprehensive quarterly reports so they can track their positive impact.
Companies can apply to become an Ecosia Trees partner at trees.ecosia.org, or contact the team directly via plant@ecosia.org. Each applicant will be considered depending on their motivations for partnering and other commitments. Ecosia has a policy where it will not plant trees for companies in industries including fossil fuels, weapons, industrial agriculture, mining, or airlines.
What’s the CO2 impact of an Ecosia search?
Since Ecosia produces its own solar electricity, and because it uses its profits to plant CO2-sequestering trees, Ecosia is not just “carbon neutral”: your searches actively remove CO2 from the air.
Being CO2 neutral is good; being CO2 negative is better. But it’s still not good enough. That’s why, in 2020, Ecosia became the first company to produce twice as much solar power as needed to power all Ecosia searches. This way, the company is actively crowding out dirty energy from the grid.
In summary, your searches on Ecosia are powered by 100% renewable energy; they plant trees that fight climate change by removing CO2 from the atmosphere, and they accelerate the energy transition away from fossil fuels by adding solar energy to the electricity grid.
Servers use a lot of power. If the internet were a country, it would rank #3 in the world in terms of electricity consumption. Internet companies bear a responsibility to mind their ecological footprint by switching to alternative, renewable energy. Ecosia’s solar plants are located in Aue (531kWp) and in Schinne (199kWp).
So what are you waiting for? Add Ecosia to your browser.
