Ecosia to dedicate green search revenues to wildfire recovery

Not-for-profit search engine Ecosia has today announced it is to respond to the record-breaking wildfires hitting North America, Australia, and Brazil by dedicating all revenues from 27 July towards wildfire restoration projects.

The carbon offset providing search engine uses the revenues generated from its search engine to fund projects that can remove 1kg of CO2 from the atmosphere for each search.  

Ecosia has already planted over 40,000 trees in the US and Australia, as well as a further 19 million in Brazil in a bid to restore forests, enhance natural carbon sinks, and bolster climate resilience. Alongside reforestation efforts in Brazil, the search engine has also invested over €400,000 in firefighting efforts via the Instituto Terra de Preservação Ambienta (ITPA), which works to put out fires and protects the country's trees.

Antonia Buchard-Levine, account manager at Ecosia's tree planting team, said the global scale of this year's wildfires had led the search engine to scale up its investments in widlfire protection and recovery.

"Though we had already planned to plant 40,000 trees this year in areas affected by wildfires, by working with our users we plan to increase those efforts so we can plant more trees to help regenerate scarred lands and encourage resilience for local forests," she said. "Wildfires are one of the most swiftly devastating aspects of the climate crisis and we must do as much as we can to prevent them from happening." 

Describing the impact Ecosia's investment would have on the battle against Brazil's wildfires, Mauricio Ruiz, an ITPA firefighter in Brazil, said: "We have been fighting forest fires for 23 years. When we started, we were amateurs without infrastructure and gradually we have evolved towards adopting more professional and efficient methods - with the same strength and determination as we had in the beginning. The Ecosia partnership is extraordinarily important to us. Ecosia recognised the importance of helping us fight the fires, because they understand the Brazilian reality, are always open to dialogues and have a strong commitment to innovation for the restoration of ecosystems."

The news comes a week after a report by Brazil's Institute for Space Research suggested the Amazon rainforest now emits more carbon than it absorbs due to fires, farming, and droughts.