The children’s and youth initiative Plant-for-the-Planet was launched in 2007. On the initiative of his teacher, Felix, who was 9 years old at the time, did research on the climate crisis. He read about the Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai, who had planted 30 million trees in 30 years with women in Africa.

Trees to protect the climate and give people self-confidence – a powerful idea!

When Felix gave his presentation, he outlined the vision that children could plant one million trees in every country on earth as a CO2 offset. In the following years, Plant-for-the-Planet developed into a worldwide movement. Children train each other at academies to become ambassadors for climate justice – 92,837 children and young people from 75 countries (as of 31/12/2021) are already involved. They give lectures and plant trees.

Meanwhile, the goal of the children and youth initiative is for humanity to plant and protect 1,000 billion trees. Trees are an inexpensive and effective means of capturing climate-damaging CO2 from the atmosphere, giving people a time-saver to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to zero and mitigate the climate crisis. This is also confirmed by a scientific study by the Crowther Lab at ETH Zurich.

In 2011, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) handed over the traditional Billion Tree Campaign to Plant-for-the-Planet – and with it the official world tree counter. Expanded to the Trillion Tree Campaign, it offers the platform as a web app and mobile app to achieve the ambitious goal. With the Plant-for-the-Planet app, anyone can donate trees to one of almost 200 different renaturation projects (as of 31/12/2021) from all over the world with just a few clicks: plant-for-the-planet.org. The platform is open source, free of charge for all participants and the data is secure and protected. Every donation goes 100% directly to the selected project.

In 2013, Plant-for-the-Planet decided to take responsibility for its own renaturation. Since 2015, Plant-for-the-Planet has been planting and caring for one new tree for every euro donated on the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico. The project shows how easy it is to plant trees efficiently and ecologically on a large scale and is now also used for scientific research on renaturation. The initiative motivates people to join the planting through the campaign “Stop talking. Start planting.”, which features prominent personalities. Plant-for-the-Planet plants a tree in Mexico for every five bars sold of Good Chocolate (test winner at Stiftung Warentest), which was invented by the children.