Welcome back!
Since I started this blog, many of you have actually mentioned Ecosia in your comments here. I am thus glad to tell you that this blog post will finally be about Ecosia! For those who may not have heard of Ecosia, fret not, for I will be giving a comprehensive overview of what it is, and how it actually works.
Ecosia is actually a search engine which plants trees for the searches you do through it. The main reason why Ecosia chose to plant trees is because trees are good absorbers of carbon from the atmosphere. They do also have many other benefits like being absorbers of pollutants from the air, soil and water and, if we are looking at social benefits, forests and trees-planting can provide a wide variety of jobs to locals.
Imagining a tree getting planted every time you search for something definitely sounds a little far-fetched so, how exactly does this work? Well, Ecosia generates its revenue from the ad-clicks on the search engine ads that come up with the search results. They then use these funds to lias with local organisations who will actually carry out these tree planting projects.
Ecosia chooses to plant their trees in areas where they would be able to achieve the greatest amount of impact, like in biodiversity hotspots. These biodiversity hotspots make up only 2.3% of the earth’s surface but hold over half of the earth’s plant species and many animal species which are unique to only these spots.
Now, enough of the technical details, so how good is Ecosia really, as search engine? Ecosia actually provides a decent amount of features such as doing simple calculations, providing weather forecasts, translations, time zones, currency conversions and many more. However, users of Ecosia do tend to notice the the kind of results that Ecosia return are not usually as refined as that of more popular search engines like Google.
Regardless, I feel like Ecosia does a great job as a search engine with such a noble cause but people will need convincing to switch over from their current search engines as Ecosia may not provide the full extent of features that more established search engines provide. Nevertheless, this is an interesting concept to look at and is one of the increasing number of noval methods people are coming up with to further environmental causes.
Sze Jie
Hi Sze Jie
I heard about Ecosia through a Youtube video which happened to catch my eye. I think that it is an interesting solution. It is something that is accessible to a global audience, and can help the environment. However, it may only be accessible to those who are privileged enough to have internet access. Perhaps this is an example of privilege affecting ability to contribute to environmental efforts. 85% of Singapore’s residents were Internet users in 2017, while middle- to low- income countries, while countries such as Bangladesh have only 15% of its residents who are Internet users (The World Bank, n.d.)
Cheers! 🙂
Fang Ning
References
Bank, T. W. (n.d.). Individuals using the Internet (% of population) – Bangladesh. Retrieved from https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IT.NET.USER.ZS
Hey Fang Ning,
Thanks for pointing that out! I actually did not think much about that since the focus of my blog was already on the Internet itself. Now that you’ve mentioned it, I do realise it is important to look into what the less privilege can do for the environment.
This however, did remind me of how there is tendency for more privileged individuals to be more concerned about the environment. This could be due to how the less privileged are more focused on aspects like meeting their basic needs for survival. So, I was thinking, that as more privileged individuals on this society, it should perhaps be part of our responsibility to do for them what the under-privileged do not have the capacity to do for the environment.
Sincerely,
Sze Jie