Is Ecosia legit?

Ecosia is an eco-friendly search engine that plants trees with their ads revenue. It uses 80% of its profits to plant trees, making it the world’s largest tree-planting organization.

In this Our Changing Climate environmental video essay, I look whether the search engine Ecosia is legit. Specifically, I figure out if Ecosia is real when they say Ecosia plants trees for every web search you make. Because there are no Snopes pieces on the Ecosia, I figured it would be important see if Ecosia is actually planting trees as they claim, as well as try to figure out whether switching from Google to Ecosia makes sense.

Resources:

1. Nature 2.0: Exploring and theorizing the links between new media and nature conservation (Bram Büscher): https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/d73c…
2. Ecosia’s B Corporation certification (B Corporation): https://bcorporation.eu/directory/eco…
3. An Unbiased Review of Ecosia (Path Around the World): https://www.patharoundtheworld.com/ec…
4. Ecosia’s financial reports (Ecosia): https://blog.ecosia.org/ecosia-financ…
5. Map of Ecosia’s tree planting projects (Ecosia): https://info.ecosia.org/#projects
6. Microsoft pledges to cut carbon emissions by 75 percent by 2030 (Microsoft): https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-is…
7. Ecosia vs. Google: Which is the best search engine? (Ecosia): https://blog.ecosia.org/ecosia-vs-goo…

Imagine the impact if google would just invest 1% of their money every year to trees!

A Wa

Trees are important for our environment. They provide oxygen, they reduce greenhouse gases that contribute to climate change and they also help to maintain the water cycle by absorbing water and releasing it into the atmosphere. Forests can also act as a barrier to keep out wildfires.