Plant-for-the-Planet is a free, transparent platform for natural restoration, i.e. for planting trees: First and foremost, this is an online platform created by children and young people who want to encourage as many people as possible to plant trees around the world. Trees are certainly not the only solution to all climate problems, but they buy us, humans, time in the fight against the climate crisis that threatens the future of us all.
Plant-for-the-Planet’s approach is that literally, anyone can use our tools to help save the future of us humans on this planet. Our goal is to plant one trillion trees, if possible, by 2030. Planting trees is simple, natural, efficient, and – most importantly – scalable worldwide. Trees aren’t just beautiful, they also give us our air to breathe, filter urban dust, measurably cool their surroundings, store water, protect from erosion and, most importantly, get CO₂ out of the air. Science proves that planting trees is a very effective way to capture CO₂.
The children who started Plant-for-the-Planet have now become young adults who have taken up the fight against the climate crisis with digital tools. Plant-for-the-Planet’s most recent in-house developments are IT tools: the Plant-for-the-Planet.org platform and the TreeMapper.app. With these applications, people around the world can plant trees from their sofa and watch these trees grow, as it were, from the same sofa, even though they are thousands of kilometers away
The new TreeMapper.app sets standards in monitoring and is designed to increase transparency in forest restoration. This way, donors know exactly when and where their trees were planted. Both apps are available for IOS and Android and are open source. So with these applications, anyone worldwide can transparently and traceably start donating trees or even create a new forest right away. For example, the software group Salesforce uses the platform or viewers of the TV station SAT.1 donated over 1.5 million trees in a good week.
The foundation of Plant-for-the-Planet are the Climate Justice Ambassadors. Children and young people sensitize each other to the challenges of the climate crisis in one-day workshops, so-called academies, around the world. Plant-for-the-Planet has organized and financed 1,600 such academies since 2008, in 75 countries with 92,000 participants. The ambassadors are intrinsically motivated to engage themselves for climate justice. They advocate for global solutions to the climate crisis and learn to argue the benefits of global solutions using the example of global reforestation. They invite adults to work together and intergenerationally for their future.
Particularly committed Climate Justice Ambassadors are individually supported through further workshops in small groups, conducted by renowned coaches. Once a year, the international ambassadors meet for a global Youth Summit. There, ambassadors from all over the world can get to know each other, network and plan joint projects. This is how the young people started at the first Youth Summit in May 2015 www.climatestrike.net. The young Climate Justice Ambassadors take a clear stand on one of the most urgent problems of our time and network worldwide.
The young people of Plant-for-the-Planet have achieved something quite amazing: They bring hope back into the seemingly hopeless climate crisis: They do not remain in the alarmism of the looming catastrophe, but show very viable and smart ways in their own interest, how we humans can use trees and smartphones in the fight against climate crisis. The children and young people don’t talk, they act: In the first 200 days of 2021 alone, they managed to get 14.2 million trees donated through their platform, and 100% of all donations went to 143 planting projects worldwide. They didn’t create this platform to make money, but to win the future. Their vision: to motivate people around the world to use the innovative transparent tree donation platform to drive the global renaturation of lost forests.
