Linked to the conference in Copenhagen, there was an article about Ecosia, a search engine that invests 80% of its revenue in saving the rain forest.Good thing. So instead of searching with google, I do the same with Ecosia, which helps me do something good without spending anything. I just had to install a plugin into firefox and here we go.
How serious is this? Do they really invest 80% of their money into saving rain forests? They work together with the WWF which is already kind of a guarantee for quality. But I still have the impression that there is a problem, just with mathematics. Let’s have a look.
The picture below shows my browser window. At the bottom left is the information on how many square meters of rain forest I have saved, and how much has been saved by all users.
In the bottom right corner the information on how much rainforest has been saved.
So overall, 260 billion square meters of rain forest have been saved. That is 260′000 km2. This somehow does not correspond with what is written on the webpage itself (1 mio yd2 which is about 0.83 million m2).
Furthermore one can read on the webpage of Ecosia that the money is invested to save the rainforest in the Juruena National Parc. Based on Wikipedia, the size of this rain forest is 19,000 km² or 19 billion m2. So the 260′000 km2 are definitively a bit over optimistic.
Now lets have a look at the interface in French:
Each search allows to savec 2m2 of rain forest. Previously it was 2.4 yd2 which is 2.1m2. A possible (probable) explanation for this is, that the income generated through Ecosia is different based on the country?
There must be some bug in the blugin because the number shown on the bottom right corner is definitively wrong. Otherwise Ecosia is probably not a bad thing. But it would still be good to have some kind of label of an independant organisation that certifies that this money really goes into saving rain forests.