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Meet the Ecopreneur:
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This international forest restoration organization is mobilizing youth around the globe to fight the climate crisis.
Felix Finkbeiner’s climate activism started at just nine years old, when he invited his classmates to help him plant 1 million trees in every country around the world. Finkbeiner, who hails from a town outside Munich, was spurred to action after he learned about the growing threat of the climate crisis—and the work of Wangarĩ Maathai, the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize laureate and environmental activist from Kenya, who started a movement in the late 1970s to plant 30 million trees in 30 years.
90K
Kids who have participated in plant-for-the-planet academies
Eco•pre•neur: an environmentally minded entrepreneur who leads and drives climate action worldwide
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Listen to Felix Finkbeiner on why it’s critical to protect the world's forests.
Felix Finkbeiner of Plant-for-the-Planet
While some might have thought Finkbeiner’s ambitions were too big for such a young kid, by the time he turned 13 in 2011, he had helped Germany plant its millionth tree, been invited to address the UN, and officially launched Plant-for-the-Planet, an impressive environmental nonprofit organization that has since expanded into a global network of youth activists working to reforest the planet. Today, one of its largest projects is a forest restoration effort on the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico, where Finkbeiner and his team have set out to plant 2.5 million trees by the end of 2022.
But his work doesn’t stop there. Finkbeiner has set his sights on planting 1 trillion trees worldwide, which could absorb an additional 10 billion tons of carbon dioxide every year. To reach this goal, Plant-for-the-Planet is continually innovating new methods to support restoration projects worldwide.
For one, the organization has developed an open source
and commission-free platform so that project leaders can transparently showcase their work, monitor their restoration impacts, and raise funds.
To learn more about Finkbeiner’s journey as an ecopreneur, we sat down with him at the Plant-for-the-Planet headquarters in Campeche, Mexico.
Q: What made you become a climate activist at such a young age?
A: When I was nine years old, the polar bear was my favorite animal. After a very warm winter in 2007, my teacher taught us about the climate crisis. That’s when I found out that the polar bear was in danger. And not just the polar bear, but all of us. When I was doing research for a presentation on the climate crisis, I discovered Wangarĩ Maathai. In 1977, she started a grassroots movement aimed at countering deforestation in Africa and mobilized local women to plant millions of trees. Her work made me want to plant trees too. I told my classmates during that presentation that we should plant 1 million trees in each country of the world. My classmates liked the idea. And a couple of weeks later, we planted our first tree. That was the kernel of Plant-for-the-Planet.
Q: Why did you choose to focus on forest restoration?
A: The most important thing we have to do to fight the climate crisis is reduce our global carbon emissions—but reduction alone is no longer enough. We also have to suck as much carbon out of the atmosphere as possible, and forests are essential in doing that.
We used to have about 6 trillion trees on Earth before humans started chopping them down. Only 3 trillion remain today. Unfortunately, we can’t get back to 6 trillion because we would need a lot of agricultural space, but we can regrow around 1 trillion trees.
Q: What is Plant-for-the-Planet’s mission?
A: Plant-for-the-Planet is dedicated to empowering young people to be
stewards of our forests and supporting community-driven restoration projects all across the world. Our mission is to protect the world’s 3 trillion trees and regrow another 1 trillion trees.
Q: Why is technology essential to achieving your goals?
A: Planting a tree is easy, but restoring entire forest ecosystems is incredibly hard. To do that at a global scale, we need cutting-edge, novel technologies to be able to manage and properly monitor all these restoration efforts.
In order to inspire and empower the world to regrow 1 trillion trees, we need state-of-the-art tools to monitor these forests and make sure they are actually growing. So, we build tools and we provide services to help these efforts be more effective and scale up restoration. We offer all of this for free to these community projects. That includes a range of software tools that helps them manage and monitor their projects, and also free ecological advice as to how to best plan restoration projects.
Q: How do you use technology in your
day-to-day operations?
A: Our most important tool is our TreeMapper, a software platform that our in-house developer team created. It allows us to track all the forests we are planting and see how they’re developing over time. We’re also using a lot of other technologies, like drone imagery, satellite imagery, and so on, to monitor and analyze these forests.
Every time our team members go out and plant trees, they map exactly where they planted each species. Weeks later, months later, years later, they go back to the sites, measure those trees again, and see how they’ve developed. What’s really important about this is that the data is transparent and accessible for anyone around the world—anyone can go to our website, look at our forests, and see for themselves how they’re developing.
Q: What challenges do you face while collecting seeds and restoring forests?
A: When we were a bunch of nine- and 10-year-olds, people weren’t taking us that seriously; they weren’t really listening to what we were trying to say. But as Plant-for-the-Planet grew, young people started joining us, and we began working with wonderful people in running restoration projects. People finally started to understand why it’s so important to regrow 1 trillion trees around the world.
Q: What is your biggest achievement so far?
A: It’s been 15 years since we planted that first tree back at my school in Germany, and a lot has happened since then. Here in Campeche, we planted 10 million trees, another 9 million trees
in other parts of Mexico, and
tens of millions more have been donated through our platform
to restoration projects all across
the world. We’ve also had more
than 90,000 kids participate
in our academies, become
climate justice ambassadors, and contribute significantly, from speaking in front of the UN to
going to the international climate conferences.
Listen to Paulina Sanchez on why youth play a key role in shaping a sustainable future.
Q: How do you work with and inspire young people to achieve your goals?
A: We’ve organized Plant-for-the-Planet academies in more than 70 countries. Academies are our one-
day workshops where we bring together kids from lots of different local schools. And they’re always organized by other young Plant-for-the-Planet ambassadors from the region who explain to the participating kids what the climate crisis is and what forests can do to fight it.
Q: Why is it important to motivate young people to fight the climate crisis?
A: The climate crisis is the biggest challenge of our time. And it’s my generation that’s going to suffer the consequences if we don’t address it right now. A lot of young people are really worried about the climate crisis, and we want to give them a chance to do something to address the problem.
Q: How can young people and other activists get involved with your mission?
A: It’s incredibly easy to get involved: You can join an academy in your local area, or you can just start planting trees yourself, or you can convince your families to support restoration projects all across the world through our platform.
Q: Where do you see Plant-for-the-Planet in the next five years?
A: I hope that in the next five years, we will have planted tens of millions of more trees, and we’ll have empowered tens of thousands of more kids to join us all across the world.
Q: What does the word “ecopreneur”
mean to you?
A: I think, at its core, being an ecopreneur means translating the best available science and technology into things we can do right now to address the biggest challenges of our time.
Read More
EXPLAINER: See why Plant-for-the-Planet is planting 1 trillion trees for a greener future.
The planet-saving potential of trees
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BEHIND THE SCENES: Episode 9
of The Ecopreneurs in Mexico.
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YOUTH MOVEMENT: The power of younger generations in fighting climate change.
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Luke Haverhals of NFW
Meet the Ecopreneur:
Eco•pre•neur: an environmentally minded entrepreneur who leads and drives climate action worldwide
Back to home
Read More
BEHIND THE SCENES: Episode 9 of The Ecopreneurs in Mexico.
Read More
YOUTH MOVEMENT: The power of younger generations in fighting climate change.
Explore More
Read More
EXPLAINER: See why Plant-for-the-Planet is planting 1 trillion trees for a greener future.
The planet-saving potential of trees
