Plant-for-the-Planet has undergone a very dynamic development, similar to a successful garage startup: While in the beginning it was more of a competition between students who wanted to outbid each other in planting trees, Plant-for-the-Planet inherited the Billion Tree Campaign from UNEP in 2011 and developed a modern digital platform from it.
On the platform, restoration organizations that reach certain standards can present their projects free of charge, make visible the areas they want to restore and collect donations. 100% of the donors’ donations go to non-profit restoration organizations. The children, i.e. the Climate Justice Ambassadors of the first hour, are today young adults who enable “planting trees from the sofa” worldwide with digital tools.
The organizational structure of Plant-for-the-Planet has to meet these requirements, especially for the non-profit Mexican sister organization, which is responsible for a large part of the donations from Germany. In the past, we focused on planting trees rather than writing annual reports, and for good reason. But we have experienced ourselves how easily enormous efforts for a good cause can be called into question if they are not fully comprehensible. We also need to learn to talk more about our work: We have resolved to communicate much more transparently.
We have a team of nine ecologists working for us in Constitución, and they are developing restoration strategies for each of our sites, showing different levels of degradation. We also operate our own research station on a 91-hectare research site near Constitución. Researchers from ETH, Zurich, Imperial College, London and other universities are involved there. At the same time, we seek advice from independent experts. We share all this knowledge with our partners so that we, as humanity, can restore as many forests as possible as quickly as possible. We should never forget that every year we lose 10 billion trees and thus valuable CO₂ stores on earth.
