![]() “Ecosia on campus campaigns don’t just help plant trees, they also help young people get involved in climate action,” Gottlieb wrote. University students have the potential to create meaningful change, whether it be through small efforts like switching search engines to support reforestation or through involvement in community activism. “However, tree-planting should not be used as an excuse to reduce emissions-there’s no way around that,” Gottlieb wrote.“ We need to stop emitting as well as re-capture past emissions.” However, it is also important to avoid invasive species and monoculture, and to work with local communities to ensure the trees survive. Gottlieb explained that reforestation is essential to any climate strategy since trees are the most efficient carbon dioxide absorbers. “That way, we’re not just producing enough energy to power all of our users’ searches with renewables-we are producing twice as much,” Joshua Gottlieb, editorial lead at Ecosia, wrote in an email to the Tribune. The company has also built solar farms to fuel their browser searches with renewable energy. Ecosia’s planting projects help preserve biodiversity, combat climate change, regenerate depleted soils, and provide food, jobs, and economic stability to vulnerable communities. Alarmingly, the natural vegetation in these hotspots has shrunk by over 70 per cent. The trees are planted in biodiversity hotspots, areas abundant in unique species found nowhere else on earth. The ad revenue is used to fund planting projects worldwide: The company supports over 20 tree planting projects across 15 different countries. Like any other search engine, Ecosia generates revenue from users clicking on advertisements that appear with search results. Through Ecosia, we are giving McGillians an easy way to neutralize the impact of their web usage.” “Everything we do consumes energy, both locally in our homes and abroad where servers are located. “All of our digital activity has its own carbon footprint,” Francois Miller, executive director at the McGill Office of Sustainability, wrote in an email to the Tribune. Since its inception in 2009, Ecosia has planted 120 million trees worldwide, and the live tree-planting counter on its homepage continues to grow. As affirmed on the company website, Ecosia is committed to protecting user privacy by not selling data to advertisers and operating free of external trackers that companies use to generate targeted ads. The McGill-specific extension for Ecosia is free and voluntary, with easy to follow installation instructions. “We’re super grateful for the sustainability team at McGill for encouraging students to switch to Ecosia,” Fred Henderson of the partnerships team at Ecosia wrote in an email to The McGill Tribune. Suppose you perform only one search per day: Combined with the 40,000 students at McGill, nearly 900 trees would be planted every day. Recently, McGill’s Office of Sustainability and IT Services have collaborated to introduce Ecosia to the McGill community as part of the university’s sustainability strategy. Ecosia, a free search engine, takes advantage of our internet usage by planting one tree per approximately 45 searches. From course work to finding the best restaurants in Montreal, students surf the net for almost anything. Think about how often you hit “search” on your computer.
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