Plant-for-the-Planet was founded in 2007 by 9-year-old Felix Finkbeiner. Children and young people raise awareness of the climate crisis through lectures and tree-planting campaigns. Their goal: to bring 1,000 billion trees back to the world. Because as natural CO2 sinks, trees give us a time joker in the fight against the climate crisis.
Trees remove CO2 from the atmosphere and store the carbon in their wood and soil. Felix Finkbeiner knows this much when he is asked to give a presentation on the climate crisis at the age of 9. He learns about Wangari Maathai on the internet. The professor from Kenya and later Nobel Prize winner has planted 30 million trees in 30 years with many women in African countries. Felix thinks about it: the children could plant a million trees in every country in the world to save their future. The idea for Plant-for-the-Planet was born.
Today, Plant-for-the-Planet is a global movement that encourages young and old to restore forests and fight for climate justice. We do this by empowering children and young people, restoring ecosystems, conducting research, providing free software tools and advice to restoration organizations around the world.
We are convinced that we need to protect the world's three trillion trees and bring back another trillion trees.
The best time to plant trees was twenty years ago. The next best time is now.
Why we fund
Plant-for-the-Planet is a children's and youth initiative with members in 75 countries. As ambassadors for climate justice, they mobilize with their platform plant-for-the-planet.org under the motto "Stop talking. Start planting." for planting and protecting trees as a time-saver in the climate crisis. To date, over 100,000 children and young people worldwide have joined the movement.
In his 2011 UN speech, Felix calls on the world to plant 1,000 billion trees. Although trees alone cannot solve the climate crisis, they buy us valuable time to simultaneously reduce greenhouse gas emissions to zero and thus mitigate the climate crisis. Trees also give people hope, because everyone, young and old, rich and poor, can help.
Restoring and protecting destroyed forest ecosystems creates prospects for the future, including for people in the poorer countries of the Global South, where trees grow particularly quickly.
PROJECT DETAILS
What we fund
Picture: Marcos Escobar
2021
In Mexico on the Yucatán Peninsula, Plant-for-the-Planet also plants its own trees. With the help of our donation, 151.79 hectares of land were acquired by Plant-for-the-Planet Mexico A.C.
In order for this area to become an intact forest again, around 400,000 seedlings must first be planted.
In 2021, 142,360 trees were planted on the area. Around 225,000 trees were planned for 2022.
Unfortunately, 2023 saw the biggest forest fire season in the region for a long time. Despite appropriate precautionary measures, the area was not spared and a large proportion of the seedlings that had already been planted were destroyed.
When asked whether the area could be left to its own devices after the fire, Felix says:
"In principle, a very correct idea. However, this area is extremely degraded with a dominant grass, which prevents natural succession. It would therefore take a very long time for trees to grow there again naturally."
