Ecologi Impact Report 2020

In 2020, the coronavirus pandemic brought about a seismic shift across all industries, as well as in individuals’ personal, professional and social lives.

Aided by the global shutdown in response to COVID-19, we saw a reduction in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, of around 7% globally. For the first time, humanity has been able to reduce emissions year-on-year, and if that trend were to continue, we could write down in the history books that 2019 was the year that global emissions peaked. We also now have a clear idea of what exactly is required to solve the climate emergency – the kinds of large scale collective action that will help us to mitigate the crisis.

On the other hand, considering the psychological and economic damage the global shutdown has caused, the pandemic has also produced a huge amount of climate anxiety – all this, for just a 7% drop in emissions?

As well as the pandemic shutdown, 2020 also saw other important developments in climate – from the 20th anniversary of the UN Global Compact, to the postponement of COP26 here in the UK. Within climate, as within all industries, 2020 was a strange and challenging year.

At Ecologi, we are taking all of this to heart, and have been working tirelessly to develop our climate positive subscription products to have more impact. Luckily, we were able to adapt to online working: our in-house operations are fully remote at the present time, and thankfully our tree-planting and offset projects have been able to continue operating throughout the pandemic.

Our Impact Report for 2020 shows a breakdown of the ways we have used our subscriber and B2B income to fund climate solutions, and how we have contributed to solving this most challenging of problems, in our first full-year of operation.

Despite the challenges of 2020, we are extremely proud of the massive impact we have had so far, and are optimistic and excited for 2021 to be a year of impactful and effective climate action.

If you have any questions about our impact, please contact hq@ecologi.com.

On 22nd December 2020, we funded our 6 millionth tree, ready to be planted in our planting sites around the world.

We had noted toward the end of the year that our tree count was accelerating, reaching a pace of approximately one million trees per month funded by our customers, in the run up to the festive period. The graph in Figure 1 shows the rate of growth in this regard, which we hope will continue into 2021.

To put this in perspective, funding our first million trees took 9 months (surpassing the one million trees mark on 2nd March 2020). By the end of the year, it took our community of climate positive people 36 days to go from 4 million to 5 million trees, and it took only 19 days to go from 5 million to 6 million.

At the beginning of 1st January 2021, we had funded the planting of 6,419,515 trees.

Some of the end-of-year increase might be attributable to a festive bump, especially with the introduction of our new gifting product, which we launched in November. We don’t have the data on this yet, as we haven’t been through enough Christmases(!) but we anticipate that it’s likely we will see a slight slowdown in the early weeks of 2021 as the festive excitement quietens down.

Due to operational constraints, there is a time lag between trees being funded and trees being purchased; we operate on a grace period of around 60 days between trees being funded by our subscribers and being purchased from our partners.

Toward the end of 2020 this time lag extended slightly, as we are making some internal banking changes to allow us to move more quickly from funding to purchasing. We anticipate catching up with our trees due for purchasing in early January 2021, ready to start a more streamlined process in the year ahead.

By the end of 2020, we had purchased (and recorded on our Public Impact Ledger) 3,471,589 trees from our partners, accounting for trees funded by subscribers up to the end of September 2020.

The graph in Figure 1 shows our accelerating rate of growth: we are currently near the bottom of an exponential curve, with our tree-funding pace approximately doubling each month. Factoring in the anticipated slowdown at the start of 2021, we can expect to reach 10 million trees funded in around March or early April 2021, with our 10 millionth tree purchased and planted well before the Summer.

Looking to the future, we are really excited for our subscriber base to continue growing, so that we can fund more and more trees around the world. With our tree count remaining on an exponential growth curve, we would expect to see around 46 million trees funded by 31st December 2021. A flatter curve would see around 17 million trees funded by then, and the reality is likely to fall somewhere in between these two.

As we are still only a young company, forecasts and projections for trees funded will become easier over time as we have more data points to look back on.

To accommodate the rapidly growing number of trees funded by our subscribers, we’ve also expanded our portfolio of planting sites. At the start of 2020, we were very small, primarily planting trees in one plot of land at Marotaola, Madagascar, and also as part of a fledgling project in partnership with the Intrepid Foundation in Kijabe, Kenya.

That first Marotaola plot has a dedicated capacity for 3 million trees, which toward the end of September 2020 was getting full, meaning we needed to expand our planting locations. That particular plot is currently 95.3% full, with 2,858,345 of our subscribers’ mangroves being planted there. 

At the end of 2020, we now fund 9 tree planting projects based in 7 countries. Our original plot (which is now known as Marotaola 1) was joined in October by neighbouring Marotaola 2, and plots in Bosawas Biosphere Reserve, Nicaragua and Changalane, Mozambique.

Our main tree-planting partner for these projects is Eden Reforestation Projects (‘Eden’), who we work with closely to plant the trees in our dedicated planting sites. The team at Eden provide the expert care, ecological knowledge and local support to make the planting happen in-country. Through our current planting sites, Eden offers steady employment and income to over 80 local people, providing sustainable and fulfilling job roles as planters, forest guards and site managers.  This is really important to us, as (as we will see in the following section), part of Ecologi’s ethos is to ensure that the effective climate solutions that we fund also generate co-benefits in other spheres – helping to establish self-sufficient sustainable local economies, and provide fulfilling and stable jobs to those that we and our partners employ.

Whilst the vast majority of our tree-planting takes place in locations in the Global South, in May 2020 we took on new tree-planting partners and began offering the opportunity for subscribers from the UK, USA and Australia to fund our much smaller tree-planting projects local to them.

Since we started planting in our additional sites in October, we have already made a significant start on filling those plots too – with around 18% of each of Marotaola 2 and Changalane already planted, and 25% of the Bosawas plot also on its way. As above, these figures only take into account those trees already purchased from our partners, and therefore not those trees funded by our subscribers but not yet purchased. 

In 2021, we are looking forward to taking some more time to visit some of our planting sites, bringing back stories and progress reports that we can share with our supporters. We’re also looking forward to working with new tree-planting partners, opening up new planting sites in the UK and around the world, and planting many more millions of trees in more locations across the world.

This year, our UK team were sadly unable to visit our overseas planting sites as planned, due to the coronavirus pandemic. However, we were able to receive photographs and progress updates from some of our sites around the world, and our company founders were able to scope out some of our new UK sites.

Receiving our first full-year update report from our Marotaola 1 planting site in Madagascar, documenting the period up to September 2020, our partners Eden Reforestation Projects update that: “with generous support from Ecologi, Eden Reforestation Projects planted 1,888,483 mangrove trees and employed 35 full-time staff resulting in a tremendous impact on local livelihoods and the environment.”

Over the past year, the team at Marotaola 1 have been filling our plot with multiple species of mangrove trees, including avicennia marina, rhizophora mucronata, ceriops tagal and bruguiera gymnorrhiza. In the photos below, you can see how our little trees are thriving. This amazing progress in our original planting site was boosted further by the millions of trees funded by our subscribers in October through December, and by the addition of our new planting sites at Marotaola 2 and elsewhere around the world.

Parallel to our tree-planting projects, our subscribers have funded the reduction of 249,464 tonnes of CO2e emissions through our verified carbon offset projects, up to the end of 2020. Each and every tonne is certified by an industry-leading formal standard (usually Gold Standard or Verified Carbon Standard).

Only purchasing carbon offsets which meet these rigorous standards is crucial to our aim of funding the most effective climate solutions, as they provide security in the measurement, additionality, permanence and (lack of) leakage of the projects that we fund. Research carried out on behalf of WWF Germany by the Stockholm Environment Institute goes into great detail on how different carbon standards track these criteria, and supports the notion that Gold Standard and VCS (alongside the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism) are the most effective, successful and appropriate standards available for carbon offset projects.

We recognise Gold Standard and VCS as the top international standards for the voluntary carbon market in terms of carbon reductions, but another key reason that we select projects that meet these standards is due to their verified and documented co-benefits relating to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). As well as this, we use the expert knowledge of our Climate Committee and resources such as Project Drawdown to carefully select which offset projects to fund, to ensure that our subscribers’ money is being used to support the most effective climate solutions there are.

As standard, we only fund offset projects that provide a verified benefit to SDG 13 – Climate Action. In 2020, on average, our carbon offset projects this year had 3.67 SDG co-benefits, meaning that, of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals, our projects provided a verified and documented benefit to an average of 2.67 other SDGs (in addition to SDG 13). Our most prolific project in terms of verified SDG co-benefits was our biopower project in India, which had a whopping eight SDG co-benefits! Going forward, by tracking additional SDG co-benefits, we can target those projects which provide much more than just their tonnage of carbon reductions, and meet verified standards in other important areas.

The breakdown of each SDG co-benefit as a proportion of all SDG co-benefits is shown in Figure 5.

Aside from SDG 13 (Climate Action), the most common SDG co-benefit among our projects this year was SDG 7 – Affordable & Clean Energy (verified in 14.9% of our projects), followed by SDG 8 – Decent Work & Economic Growth (13.2%) and SDG 3 – Good Health & Wellbeing (11.6%). 

Going into 2021, as well as selecting projects with a higher average number of co-benefits, we aim to seek out and select projects which will balance out the relevant co-benefits to ensure that as well as the climate impact that we have through the carbon standards and SDG 13, our impact will also be felt in other vital areas within the remit of the Sustainable Development Goals.

As of 31st December 2020, our supporters have funded 33 offset projects in 20 countries around the world.

Subscriber funding was spread out among projects in a broad geographical range. Predominantly, the countries where we funded offset projects in 2020 were in South and Central America, East Africa and Southeast Asia. This said, the countries which featured the most of our projects this year were India (7 projects), followed by Turkey (6 projects), followed by Brazil (3 projects).

This phenomenon occurred in 2020 because projects were selected based on individual merit (per the criteria and standards described above), which meant that in some regions (such as South America) we were funding a few projects in many countries, whereas in other regions (such as Western Asia) we were funding many projects in just one country.

In terms of scale, our offset projects tend to fall into one of two categories at either end of the spectrum: either small-to-micro scale community-based projects (such as cookstoves, or local water distribution projects) or large-scale wind or solar energy projects.

As before, the selection of projects was broadly based on the individual merit of the project itself, according to the measures in our criteria (above), which meant that any trends to do with the scale of projects funded were mostly byproducts.

The mixture does however reflect our strategic aims to fund the most effective climate solutions and projects which will promote meaningful change for the climate and for local communities, and is guided by how the projects individually map onto the most effective solutions as ranked by Project Drawdown.

In terms of the types of projects we funded in 2020, this varied, and the full breakdown is displayed in Figure 9. What this chart shows is that our most frequently funded project types pertain to higher ranked solutions on the Project Drawdown table of solutions.

For example, wind energy (Drawdown solution #2) made up 24% of projects funded, and fuel-efficient cookstoves (Drawdown solution #21) made up 12%. Other popular project types this year included avoided deforestation (15% of projects; Drawdown solution #38) and landfill gas capture (15% of projects; Drawdown solution #58).

We also focused a lot this year on protecting the Amazon (including through avoided deforestation), which is why South America was our most popular region for offset projects, with projects funded in 5 countries there this year – in Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Peru and Uruguay. Afforestation tends not to be very prominent in the count in Figure 7 (3% of projects), because the vast majority of our afforestation work takes place as part of our tree-planting projects portfolio, and the offsets projects are instead focused on other areas, such as renewables (or in the case of forestry, avoided deforestation). 

This year, we also updated the way that we calculate subscriber carbon footprints to a more robust methodology, and using the latest data available from the UNFCCC and CAIT. The new calculations will contribute to a slight change in the cost of subscriptions for some of our users, but will give us a much more accurate and robust mechanism for tracking carbon footprints offset going forward. You can read all about this update on the blog.

In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, the UK government announced its intention to cancel the 2020 iteration of the Conference of the Parties (COP 26) which was due to take place in Glasgow, in November.

We were disappointed by the cancellation of the COP for two main reasons: because much of global governance and business had gone online without issue (including other intergovernmental summits) and often, even when the UN climate conferences do go ahead, tangible outcomes from the COPs are so bureaucratically dense as to be indecipherable for many people.

Motivated by these frustrations and the knowledge that the climate clock would remain ticking, we decided to run our own global virtual festival of climate action. We called it It’s Time, and it took place on 17-18th November 2020.

With just three months to plan and organise the event from start to finish, we put together a small team and brought together 162 speakers from all over the world to inspire our virtual attendees to climate action, through both pre-recorded and live talks, activities, performances, panel discussions, documentary screenings and more.

The event was broadcast over two days from a television studio, with hosts Cel Spellman and Basma Khalifa, with content segregated into five virtual stages, streamed via Vimeo. Broadcasting over 65 hours of content, our It’s Time line-up included speakers and representatives of WWF UK, Project Drawdown, Project Everyone, Rainforest Trust UK, OLIO, Green Is The New Black, Extinction Rebellion, Intrepid Travel and many more.

The event was opened by His Royal Highness, The Prince of Wales, received a video endorsement from Sir Keir Starmer, received 205 pieces of press coverage, and reached 24,481 views from attendees in 80 countries.

As part of our commitment to plant a tree for every email sign-up to It’s Time, we funded the planting of 9,011 trees for the event. Feedback from the event was sparkling, and we were extremely proud of the positive, upbeat impact that the event had managed to deliver for so many people around the world, in an extremely challenging year for all.

Factoring in the anticipated slowdown at the start of 2021 (our Christmas gifts were a big hit), we are expecting to reach an incredible 10 million trees funded by April 2021. 

At the end of 2021, on our current trajectory we’re expecting to have planted between 17 and 46 million trees. Where our year-end total will fall, between these two figures, will become clearer as the first few months of the year take shape.

Quite frankly, whether we plant 17 million trees by the end of 2021, or 46 (or more!), we hope you’ll join us in relishing the prospect of these incredible numbers. 

On top of this, we are aiming for an anticipated 1.5 million verified tonnes of carbon dioxide prevented from entering the atmosphere from funding our other climate action projects, such as from micro scale hydropower, landfill gas capture, and preventing deforestation.

This is epic climate action funded principally by small amounts of disposable cash from individuals, families and businesses. And excitingly, there’s so much further to go. This amount of impact will be achieved by around 30,000 subscribers, nowhere near 150 million subscribers that the likes of Spotify and Netflix enjoy.

Thank you to our subscribers, partners and to all who have supported Ecologi in 2020. We cannot wait to see what 2021 brings.