In my Ecologi update series, I provide an update on the impact of Financial Expert’s donations to Ecologi – a company helping to fight climate change. In April we continued to move towards our goal at a reassuring pace.
Who is Ecologi?
Ecologi is the climate change platform we have partnered with to become carbon negative. You can visit my full Ecologi review for more details.
Ecologi distributes funds raised to accredited carbon-offset schemes across the world, to ensure that our donations create as much impact as possible.
Through Ecologi, you can become carbon negative for just £4.70 per month. Joining through my referral link, you will receive 30 trees of additional impact against your account.
Tree Update #5 – April 2021
Current subscription level: Helper (1 Carbon footprint)
Number of trees planted: We have funded 1,382 1,728 trees in total
Number of bonus trees from referrals: We’ve been awarded 570 720 bonus trees
Additional impact purchased: 250 184 trees were funded by Financial-Expert.co.uk advertising income (see below).
For the previous month’s update, see our March 2021 update.
April 2021 at a glance
Through the monthly subscription, referral trees and additional donations, we funded a total of 346 trees in April.
The website received 16,000 visitors during the same period. So this equates to one tree for every 46 visitors! Considering that Financial-Expert is a free site to use, we feel this is a very impressive stat.
To put that into context; if larger websites such as Twitter or Facebook planted a tree for every 46 visitors, they would have planted over 100 million trees each by now.
The path to 10,000 trees
April has been a steady month for our tree planting efforts. We now have a reliable path to victory by 31/12/22 and understand what we need to do to get there.
10,000 trees over 24 months equates to 416 trees per month. Therefore to keep up the required carbon-offset pace, we simply need to buy enough trees to top-up any bonus trees from referrals up to that 416 level.
At 1,728 trees, we are 17% of the way towards our target and month 4 is also 17% through the 24 month timeline.
Our purchased impact
So how many of these trees came from direct donations from Financial-Expert.co.uk? Well, in April we donated enough to add 184 trees using April advertising income.
For complete transparency and accountability, this donation is clearly labelled as ‘Financial-Expert.co.uk Apr-21’ so you can see them for yourself on the Ecologi website.
Recipients of April funding
Ecologi picks two projects to fund each month. By being selective, and focusing donations to as few partners as possible, it can keep administrative costs to a minimum for all parties involved.
Efficiency is always an important aspect of charity for me. We want to know that my money is going as far as it can. Let’s take a look at the projects Ecologi selected this month:
- Onshore wind generation in Taiwan
- Forest protection in Northern Zimbabwe
As any book about land and forestry will explain; the cost of tree planting will be directly linked to land values and the local cost of labour. That’s why many of Ecologi’s chosen projects are in emerging market economies or less economically developed countries.
If labour costs are lower, then the same budget will plant many more trees. The cost of planting a tree in the UK can be more than 5 times more expensive than a project in an emerging or frontier economy.
Targets for April 2021 – Did we meet them?
In last month’s post, we set the follow targets. Let’s see how we did.
- Refer 2 new members to Ecologi – We actually referred 5 new members
- Plant 30 trees through the personal subscription – We planted 12 trees via the subscription
- Add 150 trees through direct donations – We added 184 trees through direct donations
Planting trees is a team sport!
Help us by joining Ecologi today through my referral link which will earn each of us 30 free bonus trees! Almost as fun as getting free shares, right?
Alternatively, if you want to make a one-off contribution of trees or carbon offset to our virtual forest and directly help us hit our goal that way, then you can do so through the same link above.