People in Bristol have been helping to plant tens of thousands of trees by ditching Google and Yahoo and switching to a greener search engine.
Ecosia - www.ecosia.org - the world’s largest not-for-profit search engine, uses 80 per cent of its advertising profits to plant trees around the world. More than 6,000 people in Bristol access the Internet each day using the tree planting website, and through this, they are planting an average of 175,000 trees a year across the UK. This figure roughly equates to the size of Clifton Downs when put into a Bristol context.
The search engine uses the profits from these searches to reforest locations such as Madagascar to protect lemur habitats, Burkina Faso to restore desertified land and create employment and Australia to improve resilience to forest fires.
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Last year, these web searches contributed to planting 200 trees with Trees for Cities and the North Bristol NHS Trust at Southmead Hospital as part of its GrowYourLove campaign. This initiative aims to provide nature spaces for NHS key workers and patients as a gesture of thanks for their work during the Covid pandemic.
The University of Bristol was the first institution to switch to Ecosia in the city in 2019, and student searches at the university have helped to plant at least 5,800 trees so far. BIMM Institute Bristol uses Ecosia too, enabling 7,000 students to access the search engine.
Globally, there are now 27 education institutions that use Ecosia on campus with The University of the West of England (UWE) recently making the switch.
Faith Terry-Doyle, UWE student and the Student Union’s Sustainability Coordinator, said: “I’m delighted that our campaign to have Ecosia as our official campus search engine was successful. The climate crisis is the most pressing issue of our time and the sheer scale can feel overwhelming to deal with. Using Ecosia is one way to help combat the crisis by planting trees that help to benefit wildlife, encourage biodiversity as well as provide shelter and income to people across the world.”
Outside of Bristol, the North Somerset Council has switched over 1,000 devices to using the search engine, with other universities such as Bath Spa and hospitals including the North Bristol NHS Trust poised to switch soon. This would mean that up to 16,000 more people across the region will be able to use Ecosia at university or work and invest in the plant for the better.
The company claims to have planted more than 149 million trees since its inception 12 years ago, with over 10,000 searches per minute. You can easily add Escosia to your web browser by making it the default search engine.
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