I came across this the other day and thought if anyone else besides me takes these promises to plant trees or some other carbon capture method with a grain of salt.
As a search engine it acts as a proxy for Bing and then uses Open Street Maps when looking up addresses, so it adds a dash of privacy.
From our initial findings then, although we can’t offer a guarantee that Ecosia has reached the exact number of trees planted that it claims, it does seem like it has made a significant difference to tree planting in a number of vital and threatened ecosystems around the world.
https://cariki.co.uk/blogs/the-green-road/is-ecosia-legit-or-fake
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I know the topic is not about this… but as long as the service doesn’t run on free software, it’s like “I don’t care what you do” to me
I don’t know about ecosia, who claims to plant 0.8 trees per second, and maybe I’m too cynical here… but I assume a lot of things like this are actually subsidizing deforestation for the purpose of planting oil palms.
Here is a paper from 2002 on the website of the Malaysian government’s Palm Oil Board explaining how, at the time at least, they could actually sell carbon credits by classifying these rainforest-replacing plantations as a “Clean Development Mechanism” under the Kyoto Protocol. 🤦
If you can’t figure out what kind of trees they’re planting and where, I’d remain skeptical.
