In recent years you may have encountered a novel and ostensibly altruistic use of our ad-centric internet economy: websites or apps that claim to convert your clicks into some form of charitable giving. In middle school I would sometimes spend hours on the website Free Rice, which uses its ad revenue to donate rice to countries facing food shortages. Charitable search engines are another manifestation of this trend. Today I want to see what we can learn from one of the oldest charitable search engines: Ecosia, “the search engine that plants trees.”
How Ecosia Works
Ecosia was founded in Berlin in 2009 and its search results are powered by Bing. Its business model is as follows: as you browse the web and enter search queries, Ecosia will display ads just like the ones you would see on any other browser. Eighty percent of the profit the company receives from advertisers is donated directly to 25 tree planting organizations located throughout the Southern Hemisphere, which to date have planted as many as 105 million trees.
If you’re feeling skeptical, you’re not alone — this sounds a little too good to be true. Does Ecosia actually take the actions that it says it does, and are those actions any good?
Investigating the legitimacy of a company like Ecosia can quickly turn into a bit of a rabbit hole, but the consensus seems to be that the company’s model works. You can read why Snopes thinks so here — a major point in Ecosia’s favor is that it is a Certified B Corporation — but the short version is that money does end up in the hands of tree planting organizations, and Ecosia likes to follow up with those groups. The focus on trees stems from the belief that they are instrumental in addressing rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere; founder and CEO Christian Kroll is quoted by Wired saying, “We have enough space to plant 1.2 trillion trees. If we planted these trees, we could almost completely solve climate change.” Ecosia is also conscious of the fact that internet browsing is itself a source of carbon emissions. To offset the emissions of the servers that Microsoft uses to keep Bing running, the company has started to produce solar energy in equal measures.
What We Can Learn From Ecosia
I think there are some significant lessons to take away from Ecosia. Maybe the first of which is simply a note of optimism — it feels good to know that this German search engine and its partner organizations are out in the world putting trees in the ground. With the proliferation of greenwashing, the practice of marketing ordinary products as eco-friendly, comes a sinking feeling that no one can be trusted, but Ecosia has the receipts to prove that it really is helping fight climate change, and also not unintentionally doing harm along the way.
What Ecosia does right from an environmental perspective is make it easy for the average person to engage with environmentalism. The flipside of slacktivism is that not everyone is willing or able to take the kinds of actions that are most impactful in solving a given issue; in order to mobilize more and more people to solve the climate crisis, we need to make action accessible. The process of switching to Ecosia for web browsing is essentially painless. Its search results may not always be as robust as Google’s, but for the average person the difference is negligible.
On top of that, once Ecosia earns a new user, it often pushes them along the path of learning more. Your Ecosia homepage isn’t personalized for you like your Google homepage; instead, all of the featured links are ones educating you about climate change action. Switching your search engine might just be the first step in transforming how you think about sustainability.
- Charting the Course of the Green New Deal - October 20, 2020
- What We Can Learn from the Search Engine that Plants Trees - August 25, 2020
- Meet Luke - August 6, 2020
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