Committed to a sustainable lifestyle but don’t have the space or the time to plant trees? Want to offset your personal or company’s carbon footprint?
B-Corp certified company Treedom provides individuals and businesses with the opportunity to do exactly that. It is the only community platform in the world that helps you plant trees with just a click and allows you to follow its journey virtually.
Founded a decade ago in Florence, Italy, Treedom focuses on promoting sustainability through agroforestry projects and empowering smallholder farmers, while offering individuals and businesses an opportunity to showcase their green values and offset their carbon footprint.
The social enterprise engages smallholder farmers in developing countries who plant the tree on your behalf and takes care of it for you. This partnership gives farmers training and income opportunities, encourages biodiversity and reforestation in their country, combats soil erosion and desertification and empowers their local communities to implement sustainable systems.
In addition to the positive environmental and social impacts, Treedom also offer full transparency about your tree, giving you the chance to track your unique tree’s journey online. Each tree has its own profile page, is geo-located and photographed during planting and there’s even a special tree diary function that provides regular updates on the farmer and the agroforestry project in which it is planted.
Treedom also manages its risk of failure by planting five percent more trees to replace failed plants (mortality rate is higher during the first years). It has also engaged the support of local universities and research institutions to train farmers on best agro-forestry practices to ensure higher success rates. Annual sample checks on project areas are conducted to verify the health of the trees.
How Treedom works
It’s super simple to get started.
Head to the Treedom website and you’ll notice there’s a variety of trees to choose from such as coffee, moringa, avocado, cacao, orange and many more. The website also provides carbon offsetting details of each tree to help inform your decision.
Once you make your tree selection your shopping cart will be populated and you just choose your preferred payment method (credit card or PayPal) and pay for it as you would any other online purchase.
You will then receive a landing page which displays the location coordinates of your tree, a photograph, real-time weather information in the area it is planted and regular updates about the project.
And that’s all there is to it. There are no ongoing fees or instalment payments and your purchase has helped to directly finance the tree, offers food security and support to the smallholder farmer to maintain your tree until it is productive enough to provide them an income.
If you’re purchasing the tree as a gift, there is a possibility to personalise the tree with a name and message.
The Eco Warrior Princess Forest
We were given the opportunity to try out the Treedom platform and were super excited as you can imagine. After creating a profile, choosing a profile pic (the EWP logo) and a suitable banner pic (me standing in my sunflower patch at home) we were able to plant an avocado tree in Kenya.
In our online tree diary, we were given a unique tree ID, its latitude and longitude coordinates and a welcome video. It also had other pages where we could track carbon offsetting info, locate where exactly the tree was on a satellite map and learn more about the particular tree specimen.
About 12 days later, a photo of a guy with a group of avocado trees was published, with the caption: “Group photo! I am standing among these young Avocado trees: guess who I am!”
And then a month later an update was published by Treedom content manager Tommaso and a photo taken with Riccardo, the Forestry Manager. In the update he shared his personal insights about the Kenyan farming community where the project is taking place.
Learning the tree story, seeing the photos and reading the updates made me feel as though I was closely connected to the avocado plant, to the project and the community – even though I am in Australia and physically so far away.
This is the beauty of Treedom; you feel the power to green the planet and empower the lives of people just from a click of a button.
Now at Eco Warrior Princess we also got the chance to grow our very own company forest that we unimaginatively dubbed the Eco Warrior Princess Forest!
Hosted on a dedicated landing page, our virtual forest can be viewed 24/7 and can also be embedded on our site to encourage other people to plant trees in there. We currently have 25 cacao trees growing in Cameroon and like our avocado tree, each of the cacao trees has its on unique ID, its GPS coordinates, photo monitoring and personalised tree diary. And according to Treedom, our forest and avocado tree can absorb enough carbon from the atmosphere to fill up 14,423 basketballs!
We also have the choice to gift the trees in our forest to followers, stakeholders, partners and customers. This forest makes our green actions as a business a lot more tangible as it visually displays our social and environmental impacts.
Over the last ten years, the social enterprise has planted more than 1.1 million trees in Africa, South America and Italy, supported more than 69,000 farmers, engaged more than 2,500 businesses and over 426,000 people across the world.
Treedom offers individuals and companies the chance to green the planet in a fun, easy and interactive way while economically empowering communities and offsetting carbon emissions. It’s a win-win-win on all fronts – for you, for communities and the planet.
To learn more, to purchase a tree or start your own forest, visit www.treedom.net.
We’re also running an Earth Day Giveaway and giving 25 people a chance to win their very own cacao tree that will offset 55kgs of carbon and will be planted in Cameroon (but virtually in the Eco Warrior Princess forest). To enter and win your very own Treedom tree, visit this page for more details.
Disclosure: This post was sponsored by Treedom. All images (screen shots or otherwise) sourced from Treedom.net and product information provided. Any opinions expressed are held by that of the author. For more information about our policies, click here.
