I came across this the other day and thought if anyone else besides me takes these promises to plant trees or some other carbon capture method with a grain of salt.
As a search engine it acts as a proxy for Bing and then uses Open Street Maps when looking up addresses, so it adds a dash of privacy.
I don’t know about ecosia, who claims to plant 0.8 trees per second, and maybe I’m too cynical here… but I assume a lot of things like this are actually subsidizing deforestation for the purpose of planting oil palms.
Here is a paper from 2002 on the website of the Malaysian government’s Palm Oil Board explaining how, at the time at least, they could actually sell carbon credits by classifying these rainforest-replacing plantations as a “Clean Development Mechanism” under the Kyoto Protocol. 🤦
If you can’t figure out what kind of trees they’re planting and where, I’d remain skeptical.