FAQs

We’re not a charity, but a social enterprise. This means we’re not registered as a non-profit.

It might seem at odds with our mission, which is to create a platform to halt climate change. But with non-profits come with financial limitations – chiefly, that we wouldn’t be able to rely solely on donations and government grants to reach the scale that we’re intending. Only a self-sustaining business model is attractive for investors who often come with deep pockets and mean we can grow very quickly indeed.

We are otherwise operating like a charity, by borrowing the best elements that serve our cause: publicly publishing financial information, customer revenue data, impact data, and our board meeting minutes. Also, our margin of just 20% is comparable with that of some of the best charities.

There are billions of concerned people on this planet who care, but don’t know how to make a meaningful contribution. If we can get the right platform that allows us to make the impact we want to, and continue the process of carbon awareness then there’s an amazing opportunity.

The underlying projects you’ll be supporting (like reforestation, renewables, efficient cooking stoves) are all ranked highly in terms of climate change solutions.

For carbon offsets, we publish retirement certificates each month which evidence how many tonnes of CO2 have been prevented from going into the atmosphere through our funding. You can view these here.

We only buy carbon credits that meet industry-leading carbon standards – primarily the Gold Standard, but also the Verified Carbon Standard.

For our tree-planting activities, you can view the associated invoice receipts of purchases from our tree planting partners around the world.

Our partners are regularly audited by third parties to ensure that the tree planting our community funds is being carried out properly. For example, check out this annual audit for our tree planting project in Madagascar.

Read more on quantifying tree impact here.

Your footprint depends on a number of factors, including where you live, and how you live your life.

If you live in the Global North, it is very likely your carbon footprint is currently well beyond the tolerable amount for limiting warming to 1.5ºC. Even if your food is plant-based, local and in season, there’s a mind-boggling carbon cost for almost anything you spend your money on.

We recognise that the concept of an individual carbon footprint is controversial, especially given that it is often reported that most emissions come from just a small cabal of ultra-high emitting companies. However, our platform is built around the principle of inspiring the collective action of millions of individuals – so the individual carbon footprint is a useful framework to use, to help individuals chip in with a small share of the load.

It also allows our subscriptions to be a little bit cheaper for those who come from low-emitting countries (because the footprint their subscription is offsetting is smaller), which offers those who have contributed the least to climate change a reduced burden for funding the solutions that will solve it.

We love your eagerness, but as we’re a small team we’re unable to handle every single enquiry from every business. If you’d like your business to become climate positive please check out our Climate Positive Workforce page, this will explain everything and get you set up straight away.

If your business has an online store you can further your impact by adding our Shopify plugin. This enables you to help your customers plant trees as they shop.

Scientific studies have shown that mangroves “sequester carbon at a rate two to four times greater than mature tropical forests”, and contain “the highest carbon density of all terrestrial ecosystems.”

Mangroves are also key part of coastal ecosystems, and “renowned for an array of ecosystem services, including fisheries and fibre production, sediment regulation, and storm/tsunami protection”.

The key to mangroves is the large amounts of biomass stored underground in the extensive root system. These roots support the large trees in muddy coastal areas where mangroves thrive.

To this end, a lot of the trees we have funded to date – in particular at the start of our journey – have been mangroves.

The initial survival rate at our mangrove restoration projects (where the majority of our trees are planted) exceeds 80%. However, between years three and five the young mangrove trees begin to produce their own propagules (baby mangrove trees) resulting in a proliferation of natural regeneration. Multiple studies demonstrate the initial survival rate combined with natural regeneration results in a luxuriant impact ranging between 150 and 500 percent.

For all of our tree-planting projects, we are selective in choosing partners to work with who actively take steps to secure these high survival rates.

Trees are one of the best tools we have in removing carbon pollution from our atmosphere. All of the trees funded by our community will quietly absorb and lock away carbon from the atmosphere over their lifetimes.

For the purposes of our own reporting, the carbon absorbed by our trees planted is not taken in to account here at Ecologi.

This is because the process of “carbon offsetting” must be carried out using verified carbon credits – and not with approximations of carbon sequestered by trees in our tree-planting sites.

We only purchase carbon credits from the most reputable carbon standards, such as Gold Standard and Verified Carbon Standard. With your Ecologi subscription, you regularly contribute towards purchasing carbon credits from two projects per month, and (separately) you plant trees.

No! The trees you’re funding right now are years away from doing their thing.

Every Ecologi subscription is used for two purposes: to offset your carbon footprint through verified carbon offsets, and – separately – to plant trees.

The carbon offset projects you fund to offset your footprint rotate each month between top-quality projects that avoid greenhouse gases from entering the atmosphere (such as renewable energy projects which displace existing fossil fuel energy). We only fund offset projects which meet the highest verification standards, such as Gold Standard or Verified Carbon Standard. In addition, we aim to fund offset projects which meet other important sustainability and development standards like CCBS and SDVista.

This is another core aspect of a responsible reforestation project. Our planting sites are routinely audited by third parties to check the reported number of healthy trees are growing.

Eden Reforestation Projects, our largest tree-planting partner, has a brilliant track record of meeting the reported numbers of trees. Please contact them if you want to see copies of these reports.

For our UK trees, for each UK tree add-on you will receive an image of your tree and its location on What3Words – so you can see for yourself that the tree you have funded has indeed been planted.

Nobody can 100% guarantee that fires will never happen. However, you absolutely can take steps to minimise the likelihood of forest fires.

We partner only with tree-planting organisations who practise responsible forestry, with the minimisation of forest fire risk in mind. This can take many forms – and methods are often location-specific.

Luckily, due to the nature of the projects, fires at mangrove planting sites (which make up the majority of our tree planting capacity to date) are seldom a danger, since mangroves are planted in coastal wetlands.

We also take part in 1t.org‘s Reforestation Working Group to ensure that we are abreast of all the latest knowledge and developments in responsible forestry.

Yes. Monoculture forests do not fall under the category of responsible reforestation, and neither does planting species that aren’t appropriate for the local biosphere or climate.

As one example, at our planting sites in Madagascar, our partners Eden Reforestation Projects are planting over 50 different species, including:

This question applies primarily to our projects operated by Eden Reforestation Projects around the world.

In order for a planting site to be developed, the native population must have explicitly agreed to the project and must benefit from the project in its entirety.

With planting in Madagascar, the project is done with permission from the owners of the indigenous land, in conjunction with the government.

Local communities benefit from many aspects of the project, such as 2.4 million work days that have been created, access to fruit harvesting, and many other economic benefits of restoring deforested land.

Eden Reforestation Project’s mission is to provide fair wage employment to impoverished villagers as agents of global forest restoration. They hire people in rural villages in developing countries to grow, plant and guard to maturity native forests on a massive scale. Their “Employ to Plant” methodology  results in multiplication of positive socioeconomic and environmental outcomes.

The project aims to 1) alleviate extreme poverty by hiring local villagers to grow, plant and guard large-scale forests restoration sites 2) provide a consistent income to poverty-stricken communities encouraging economic growth and 3) restore the environment through reforestation efforts, improving fisheries, agriculture and carbon sequestration.

Eden Reforestation Projects’ Employ to Plant methodology works by employing the local community to reforest their environment, thus addressing one of the leading causes of deforestation. All too often, families living in extreme poverty are forced to cut down their forests in order to produce marketable goods to feed their families. By removing this need and providing a source of reliable income, these families can then meet their primary needs and prepare for the future. The employment of the local community also fosters a deep connection between the villagers and the land. Reforesting and protecting the land encourages the villagers to invest in the success and growth of trees, which they begin to love and care for.

All of Eden’s planters and workers are paid at least the required minimum wage for a full month’s work…regardless of the number of days they work during that month. Therefore, if weather or ocean conditions prohibit the ability to plant on any given day, the workers are still paid their full wages. In addition, government regulations require that our employees are provided with a full month off from work each year. They honour this regulation and their employees receive their full wages during this month off. In addition, as a result of their employment with Eden, their Malagasy employees are also receiving government health care and retirement funds.

For the vast majority of our village employees, their work with Eden is providing them with the first cash paying job they have ever had and this income is transformational for them.  Those who were once victims of indentured servitude have been able to pay their debts and earn their freedom.  People who were once desperate and unable to provide for their families are now sending their children to school, starting micro enterprises, and planning and saving for their futures.

Eden care very deeply for those who work at their project sites and they have wonderful relationships with them. Therefore, when we hear of needs within our planting communities, they do whatever we can to provide assistance.  They have dug wells to provide clean water, provided food, provided blankets and emergency assistance following torrential rains and extreme flooding, equipped villages without access to electricity with solar panels and fuel efficient stoves, and provided emergency medical assistance to people experiencing life threatening conditions.  They have even built two schools to educate children who no longer have to work on a daily basis to help their parents make ends meet. In addition, the improvement of traditional income generating activities such as fishing and farming also helps the community understand the direct benefits they receive from a healthy forest.

By working directly with each community to establish planting sites and planting strategies, Eden ensures that the local communities feel a sense of commitment and they build a relationship with their environment. Through employment, the need to cut down the forest and trees is eliminated which therefore allows the community to focus on restoring their environment while still being able to earn a liveable wage. Over time, the impact of the restored land continues to increase as fisheries improve, water tables replenish, and biodiversity returns.

Carbon avoidance credit prices are influenced by a huge number of factors.

At Ecologi, our aim is to ensure as much money goes into funding climate solutions as possible, and that’s reflected in our commitment to very small margins on our prices.

In terms of the underlying cost of carbon credits, there are a few factors in play:

• Project type: some projects (for example, nature-based projects) are more expensive compared to others (for example, renewables).
• Volume purchased: at Ecologi we routinely buy a lot of credits in bulk, which means that we can pass on the savings to our customers.
• Vintage: the ‘vintage’ refers to the year the verified carbon avoidance took place. Since carbon avoidance projects run for many years, not all the credits are bought every year – so smaller volumes float around on the markets, and are often cheaper to acquire. At Ecologi, we generally commit to buying only credits with vintages eight or less years old – since we want to ensure that the credits are being measured using the latest methodologies and technologies.

In order to generate quality carbon credits, the project needs to be:

Real: show that there is real evidence that this project will actually avoid or prevent emissions.

Additional: demonstrating that the avoided emissions would not have taken place, without the carbon finance.

Measurable: for a project to be certified to a carbon standard, its impact must be accurately measurable.

Permanent: the project must ensure the emissions are permanently avoided from entering the atmosphere.

Verifiable: independent third-parties must be able to routinely verify the project is making the stated emission avoidance.

Minimise leakage: ‘leakage’ refers to unintended negative consequences (such as emissions) caused elsewhere due to the project activity. Projects must minimise leakage – though, due to ripple effects, leakage of emissions can never be reduced to zero (since even producing a wind turbine causes emissions!). Leakage can also refer to negative consequences in other areas – like generating negative impacts on local communities, and so a good project will mitigate this risk too.

Standards like Gold Standard and the Verified Carbon Standard (VCS) scrutinise projects and their credits based on these factors – and more, such as their contributions to the UN Sustainable Development Goals – at the point of issuing the credits for the developer to sell.

That’s why we support projects which meet these standards – and we also add our own in-house due diligence on all projects as well.

At Ecologi, as well as only supporting credits issued to leading standards, and the internal due diligence we put into finding high-quality carbon avoidance projects, we also use third-party platforms like Sylvera to scrutinise the projects we support.

Partnerships like these allow us to look more closely at the project activity – such as what baseline it used, how it proves additionality, and how it contributes toward the local community.

Whilst we can never reduce all risks associated with these projects, at Ecologi we take great care in mitigating as many of these risks as possible to ensure that our customers can trust that credits they buy from us, are as high-quality as possible.