Nov 8, 2019 9:00 AM

Want to Plant More Trees? Just Use a Different Search Engine

The search engine Ecosia is trying to slow climate change by funneling profits into organizations that plant trees in deforested areas.

an aerial photo of a bunch of trees planted in rows in a plaza

Climate change is the problem we have few answers for, because every little thing we do makes it worse. Your morning coffee, the clothes you wear, every inch you travel by motorized means—it all adds more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. If it were one element of our society or personal lives we’d have to change, that would perhaps be manageable. But it’s everything, and that is paralyzing.

If only, preposterously, all those minuscule actions were not tiny inflictions on the environment, but tiny improvements to it. One company is trying to do exactly that for our most perpetually present source of ongoing damage to the planet: the internet.

Ecosia is a search engine that donates the bulk of its expendable funds to tree-planting organizations around the globe. You search to see if that was, as you suspected, Bill Hader doing the voice of that animated squirrel, and somewhere far away, a tree is put into the ground. Though it is based on Bing, Ecosia anonymizes all user data after holding it for four days (according to Ecosia, this four-day period is for security purposes) and has a written agreement with Microsoft requiring the company to follow the same practice.

After paying for its operational and marketing costs, Ecosia invests the rest in long-term projects and tree-planting organizations. That’s how, by Ecosia’s own count, it has planted over 70 million trees since its founding in 2009. It also takes a “first, do no harm” approach by building solar farms that cover the energy required to operate Ecosia itself.

More Results

Ecosia is part of the Microsoft Search Network, which includes Yahoo, AOL and DuckDuckGo. This allows Ecosia to access the search algorithm that powers Bing, and Microsoft’s network of advertisers, in exchange for a percentage of its ad revenue. The precise amount is confidential, but Ecosia Founder and CEO Christian Kroll says that Ecosia takes “the vast majority” of the revenue it generates.

This partnership means that an Ecosia search requires not just its own servers but Microsoft’s as well, and when it comes to sustainability, Microsoft is crushed by Google. Google began offsetting 100 percent of its energy usage with clean energy purchases in 2018 that cover both its data centers and offices. (Its actual power still comes largely from dirty sources, but it buys an equivalent amount of clean energy.) Microsoft, on the other hand, states that it is on pace to offset 60 percent of its energy usage by the end of 2019, and is committed to 70 percent by 2023.

In that sense, Google is more eco-friendly than the search engine with “eco” in its name. According to Ecosia, the company factors in the energy it uses from Microsoft in all its claims about sustainability. Kroll says Ecosia was on pace to generate 200 percent of its total energy use from new sustainable sources (“Why stop at one hundred?”) but that progress was slowed by Ecosia’s own growth. According to its self-published financial statements, Ecosia’s July 2019 revenue (over $1.6 million) was more than double its July revenue the previous year.

Digging Deep

What jumps out when perusing Ecosia’s financial documents is not the growth, it’s the margins. Ecosia’s operational costs are generally quite lean: Its operational and marketing costs (including employee salaries) rarely eclipse 50 percent of revenue. Most of the rest goes toward tree planting, and a slice gets stashed for long-term projects.

Bing, meanwhile, was $1.3 billion in the red in 2013 and only became profitable in 2016. How is it that Ecosia has been merrily pumping out month after month in which it brings in at least double its total cost of operating—unheard of for nearly any business—while its technological backbone only recently became profitable?

The answer is that Ecosia can collect the profits per click of a major search engine (minus Microsoft’s cut) while spending next to nothing on the technology to create and maintain such a service. Ecosia employs around 25 software engineers. Microsoft does not disclose how many engineers work specifically on Bing, but it’s clear from financial reporting around Bing that the company’s budget is several orders of magnitude greater than Ecosia’s. Ecosia pays for its own servers, maintains a browser plug-in and mobile app, and the rest of the team works on marketing and operations. The heavy lifting of operating a search engine is outsourced to a tech colossus.

And of course, what gets labeled as marketing in the budget are funds spent to get Ecosia ads in front of your eyeballs, but the real marketing is the trees themselves. There are plenty of options if you don’t want your search history tracked, but only one if you want your query on Nina Simone’s deep cuts to put saplings in the ground.

Nurture Nature

Margins in hand, Ecosia works with organizations that plant trees by the thousands and tens of thousands in biodiverse regions, and without the use of child labor or chemical pesticides. Of course, much of reforestation happens in areas that have been deforested, and if Ecosia’s partners cannot address the existing incentives to chop down trees—namely a need for agricultural land, firewood, and timber—the company might take its funds elsewhere. Community buy-in is essential for the sustainability of a project.

“It’s easy to plant trees,” says Kroll, “but it’s very difficult to make sure they stay standing.”

The planting itself can bring paid labor to the community, and from there the planting organization often works to show how the harvest, branches, and soil benefits make the tree more valuable in the ground than felled. Whether those efforts succeed obviously changes case by case, and year to year.

Kroll says Ecosia monitors the ongoing progress of each planting project it funds, and may reduce future donations to an organization if it is unable to put or keep trees in the ground. Ecosia gets into the weeds on these issues and many others with each organization they work with.

The partner organizations that responded to my inquiries described a lengthy process of working with Ecosia to determine where, when, and how many trees would be planted in a specific area. Trees for the Future, for instance, wrote, “We anticipate planting 1,200,000 trees through the four-year project. As of August 2019, 598,896 trees have been planted in our Kaffrine 3 project [in Senegal] through Ecosia’s support.”

Hommes et Terre, which received close to a million euros from January to July of 2019 for its work in Burkina Faso, described a similarly detailed three-year plan that it hammered out with Ecosia.

Power Plants

In making their own operation sustainable, Ecosia’s founders foresaw a growing threat: their company’s value. As it grows, the possibility of cashing out becomes weightier. After all, with 50 percent margins, there is plenty of room to provide shareholder dividends while still putting an impressive number of trees in the ground. Kroll and the other executives could sell, become millionaires, and move onto whatever sort of project they’re in the mood for. So, they legislated away their power to do so.

Ecosia describes itself as a “purpose company,” meaning, according to Kroll, that a foundation holds 1 percent of its shares, 99 percent of its capital, and veto rights over any sale of the company. Ecosia is not permitted to issue shareholder dividends, and only employees can be shareholders. In order to sell, the foundation would have to be convinced that the sale will result in more trees being planted.

Beneath all of this is the assumption that planting trees is a good idea. To Kroll, it’s nearly good enough to stop climate change.

“We have enough space to plant 1.2 trillion trees. If we planted these trees, we could almost completely solve climate change. To plant these trees we would need 1 percent of the global military budget. It’s way more cost-effective than renewable energy, electric cars. I think it’s underestimated.”

How big a piece of the carbon pie can be handled through tree planting alone is a live debate among climate scientists, but all will acknowledge it can be a meaningful part of the solution. Add in the benefits to the surrounding economy and ecosystem, and it’s hard to argue with tree planting as a worthy use of available funds. (Though even this requires a caveat: a recent IPCC report noted that mass tree-planting initiatives could significantly raise food prices.) That said, truly solving climate change will inevitably involve real changes in how we live and transport ourselves. Trees help, but, to summarize a jungle of a climate debate, it’s more complicated than that.

But hey, 70 million trees and counting ain’t bad for a search engine with a small fraction of the overall market. Ecosia faces a lot of too-good-to-be-true skepticism, but it is a certified B Corporation, meaning that it has been forced to meet certain standards around transparency and social impact. The recipients of the company’s funds generally confirm what Ecosia claims, as does Microsoft and a recent Snopes investigation.

You really can cause trees to be planted throughout the global south, just because you somehow got into an argument about whether Billy Joel has a Christmas album. What you can’t do is assume Ecosia’s deal with Microsoft will exist in perpetuity. There doesn’t appear to be anything stopping Microsoft from doubling the rate it charges Ecosia or pulling back its assurances that it will anonymize Ecosia’s search data.

A hippo has a symbiotic relationship with the bird that cleans its teeth, but that doesn’t mean the hippo always acts in the best interests of the bird. And Ecosia is a rare bird. Markets are supposed to iron out a company that spends half its revenue on trees. It’s existence is made possible by Microsoft, which likely figures that a new Ecosia user is an old Google one, and the nature of software in which billions of dollars in infrastructure can be shared with a few lines of code. As long as Ecosia can survive in the digital ecosystem, it will do what it can to restore the real one.