Save the rainforest by surfing the web!

Ecosia helps protect Brazil's beautiful Juruena National Park

How many square meters of rainforest have you saved in the past week? I’ve saved 121.6 m² – pretty cool, right? The best part is that all I had to do was search the internet using the new eco-friendly search engine, Ecosia.

Launched in Germany on December 7, 2009 (along with the start of the UN Climate Conference in Copenhagen), Ecosia donates 80% of its revenue to the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) – more specifically, to their project to protect Juruena National Park, a thriving tropical rainforest located in the heart of Brazil’s Amazon River basin. Ecosia claims so far to have saved just over 35 million square meters of rainforest, calculating that each and every search performed on their website saves about 2m².

According to these estimates, one user can save an average of 2,000 m² per year (if 1% of internet users joined in, that would equate to the size of Switzerland annually). Of course, this begs the question – how can we verify that every single search is directly contributing to protecting the rainforest?

Ecosia explains that it is actually the clicks on sponsored links that generate revenue – but by doing a calculation of the percentages of searches that land sponsored clicks and the amount of money it costs to save one hectare of rainforest (just €5 or 47RMB), the average still comes out to about 2m² per search.

Alright, so it’s not entirely fair to say that each and every search you make will directly save the rainforest, but what other search engines are you aware of that donate almost all of their proceeds to WWF? Besides, all of their servers are run on green, carbon-free energy sources. That’s enough for me.

So how do I know I’ve saved exactly 121.6m² so far? Visit www.ecosia.org to learn more or install the Firefox/IE add-on for fast, easy, green searching, and you’ll find out.

- Schuyler Olsson