Ecosia

WUR Ecosia Collective

Ecosia is a search engine that plants trees as a direct result of your searches! Do you want to learn more about Ecosia, its relation to the WUR and about the Ecosia Collective? Then you are at the right place!

About Ecosia

Who would be able to write their thesis or any other report without a little help of Google? Unfortunately every time you search for something with a search engine it emits some CO2. Though search engines like Google and Bing strive to be carbon neutral, they are competitive companies focused on profit. Luckily there is an alternative: Ecosia. Ecosia is a non-profit search engine that uses all of their profit to plant trees, while still offering quality search results.

Projects

All of the profit that Ecosia makes by providing you with search results get transferred directly to a number of organizations in four countries: Peru, Burkina Faso, Madagascar and Indonesia. Soon a project will also start in Tanzania! The local organizations that receive the financial resources are carefully selected and plant as many trees as possible with attention to biodiversity and the livelihood of the local communities.

Potential

Many of the posters and infographics that can be seen regarding Ecosia claim that together we can plant 1 300 000 000 trees per year. But what is this number based upon? As is specified in the introduction of this webpage, Ecosia plants trees with the profit they from their users making searches with their search engine. According to their statstics, on average every 56 searches lead to enough profit for the funding of one new tree. So this means that the potential of 1 300 000 trees per year  that is specified in the posters is a product of the total amount of searches per year of all of the about 16 000 Wageningen University and Research students and employees, divided by 56. A short sample study has shown that the average search engine user of the WUR makes about 17 searches per day, divided over personal and university devices. Taking into consideration holidays and weekends, the total potential number of searches comes down to about 72 800 000. Diving this number by 56 leads us to a potential amount of trees per year of 1 300 000.

The potential amount of 1 300 000 trees per year is a huge figure. It is hard to comprehend how big this would be, or what the individual impact of every user is. The following infographic attempts to make the numbers a bit more manageable by putting them into a relatable context.

How to

If you want to start planting trees then change your search engine now via the following link: Ecosia.org. By using this link you do not only help with reforestation projects across the globe, but you also become part of the WUR Ecosia Collective! This group allows all the Ecosia users of the WUR to gain insight into the amount of trees that are planted as a results of their searches. Regular updates on this joint effort will be spread by the Green Office. Joining the Collective is really easy, just follow the steps on the linked website! If you already are an Ecosia user and you want to join the WUR Ecosia Collective, simply reinstalling Ecosia using the provided link will do the trick.

Spread the message

Do you want to help spread Ecosia through the WUR? Tell a friend about our website or post one of our posters on your Facebook page!

Questions

If you would like to receive more information or need some help with installing Ecosia as your search engine, then don’ t hesitate to contact us at: greenoffice@wur.nl