Planting trees is a beautiful activity. Not only because it is so much fun, but it is also beneficial for both us and the nature. In addition to that, when we plant trees, we are directly saving the world. Speaking of which, indeed our world is still need to be saved from many things such as global warming and climate change.
During this coronavirus outbreak, most of us must be desperate to go out and save the world. Starting from home is the right step. We can learn how to live plastic free and zero waste, and apply it during our stay at home.
Planting trees at home is another option to do. We can do it in our yard and start from small trees like Kiri trees or any other trees. But what if we desire to give more impact by planting trees outside of our homes? Can we do it from our houses, or maybe anywhere else?
The answer is yes, we can. These apps will help us to plant trees in places where it is needed the most. These green apps that we can operate through our smartphones will plant trees for us. Here are the apps you might want to consider installing.
Forest App
“Stay focused, be present” is the slogan of this smartphone application. This application is available for both android and iPhone and we can just simply install it for free. But how can this application plant tree for us?
Forest app works by helping you stay focused to what you do without being distracted with your smartphone. It helps to fight our phone addiction and is indeed one of the most popular productivity smartphone applications.
To use it, you first need to ‘plant’ virtual tree after opening it. After that, you can just leave it alone. When you are distracted and leave the app for another application in your smartphone, the virtual tree you plant will wither, and if you leave it for too long it will eventually die out.
After successfully grow full-grown virtual tree, which also means you have successfully left your smartphone without being distracted, users will earn credits. The credits earned from this process can be used to ‘buy’ real trees to be planted.
The developer is working together with Trees For The Future foundation to make this process happen. Up to nowadays, more than 800.000 real trees have been planted. “With Forest, users can have a delightful experience to spend less time on their cell phones, focus on what’s more important in their lives, and keep our environment green,” as stated in the website.
Ant Forest
Alipay is an online payment platform established by Alibaba Group. This platform overtook PayPal as the world’s largest online payment platform in 2013, and up to nowadays this platform continues to grow bigger and bigger.
This platform provides the users an add-in named Ant Forest that’s developed by Ant Financial Services Group in 2016. This add-in is the green part of this platform that will plant real trees after we reduce our carbon emissions in real life.
How? When the users are adopting green lifestyle such as walk or cycling to work, use public transportation, or pay things online, they will be awarded with tokens called ‘green energy’. The green energy that the user gained can be used to grow virtual tree, which is then converted into real trees planted in China.
Apparently, this method of planting trees online is quite successful in real life, especially in China where the app is developed. As in May 2017, data recorded that about two hundred million users have participated in Ant Forest.
Data recorded that in up to August 2017, this app has helped us to reduce 1.22 million tons carbon emissions from users’ real-life carbon reducing activities, in addition to 122 million entity trees being successfully planted by August 2019. Users can even check the real trees planted by this app via satellite.
Tree-Nation
Those two apps mentioned above were developed to help users plant trees by doing their daily activities. Even though there are so much benefits we can get from those apps, but some might feel the process is too indirect and too slow.
Well, if you want to plant trees online in a more straightforward way and feel the rush to save this planet as soon as possible, we can just plant trees from some websites. Today, there are so many trustworthy websites that will happily plant trees for us.
One of those are Tree-Nation. The website is home to 241 planting projects from 33 different countries. Not only it can serve us as normal citizen, but Tree-Nation also provides its service to help even biggest companies to compensate their carbon footprints.
We can just visit the website and it will guide you to choose what kind of tree to plant, where to plant it, and how much do you want to plant. The starting price is just 0.10 Euro per tree, and in addition to that you can even gift the tree you purchase to your friends or clients.
Up to nowadays, Tree-Nation has helped users to plant about 6,5 million trees worldwide and in every single continent. If users want specific place for new tree-planting project, this website also offer a ‘voting system’ where users can suggest the places where they want to make it happen. All of those things can be done at home.
Planting Trees From This Lovely Website!
Another trustworthy platform where we can plant trees from our homes is of course this lovely website, Earthbuddies. We do it via World Wildlife Funds’ project of reforestation in Indonesia named My Baby Tree Donate for Nature.
There are 5 locations for reforestation in this project, which are Muara Gembong, Ciliwung Watershed, Lamong Bay, Sumber Kima in Bali, and Lam Ujung in Aceh. The main species of tree to be planted is mangrove, because not only it can contribute to the nature just like other trees, it can also help people in Indonesia to prevent sea abrasion.
What’s special from our offer is that donators can plant more trees with their donation. The reason is because we use Indonesia’s currency difference where you can get extra 1 tree for each donation worth of 5 trees.
We are more than happy to help more people to contribute their best to the nature. And if you want to learn more about this project, just click the image below.
Sources: