7,144 Trees Planted Across 14 Countries: Our 2025–2026 Reforestation Update

Why we plant trees

We build websites. Websites run on servers. Servers use electricity. That electricity has a carbon cost. We try to reduce that cost as much as we can through efficient code, green hosting, and lightweight design. But some emissions are unavoidable, and tree planting is how we address what's left.

A mature tree absorbs roughly 22 kg of CO2 per year. Over a 40-year lifespan, that's close to a metric ton of carbon removed. By tying our planting directly to our digital operations, we're connecting the carbon we produce with the carbon we help take out of the atmosphere.

It's also not purely about carbon accounting. Trees restore degraded land, support biodiversity, prevent soil erosion, and create work for local communities doing the planting and maintenance. The environmental argument is solid, and the human one is hard to ignore.

The numbers: 7,144 trees across 14 countries

Over the 2025–2026 fiscal year, we funded the planting of 7,144 trees across 14 countries on six continents through verified reforestation partners. Each site was selected for ecological urgency, credible local partners, and measurable long-term carbon and biodiversity outcomes. Every planting is tracked through GPS-tagged records, survival rate monitoring, and long-term maintenance commitments. We did not simply hand over funds and walk away. The numbers are auditable, and our Impact Dashboard publishes them live.

Our CORE site — the burnt Mkussu Forest in the Usambara region of Northern Tanzania — accounted for roughly 98.8% of the trees we planted this year (7,057 of 7,144), restoring a forest devastated by wildfire with the native Afrocarpus usambarensis. The remaining 87 trees were pilot plantings across 13 other countries: Canada (our first domestic planting, a Boreal Forest habitat restoration in Manitoba), Mexico, Bolivia, Nigeria, Brazil, Romania, Zimbabwe, Ireland, France, Argentina, Australia, Spain, and the United Kingdom. Pilots are small by design — they test partner reliability, diversify species and ecosystems, and generate the reporting data we use to decide where future CORE investment should flow.

7,144 is not a round marketing number, and that's part of the point. It's the actual count from our planting records. What matters more than the number is the trajectory: 958% growth over the prior fiscal year (675 trees in 2024–2025), and roughly 358,750 kg of CO₂ offset over the lifetime of this year's plantings. This isn't a one-off PR campaign. It's built into how we fund and operate.

Tree planting is not enough on its own

Planting trees does not give anyone a pass to keep polluting. The most useful thing any organization can do is cut emissions at the source. For digital organizations, that means efficient code, compressed images, green hosting, fewer third-party scripts, and honestly asking whether every feature needs to exist.

A tree planted today won't hit full carbon absorption for 10 to 20 years. The carbon from a bloated website hits the atmosphere immediately. The order matters: reduce first, then offset what's left, and be transparent about both.

That's why tree planting is one layer for us, not the whole strategy. The rest includes energy-efficient web development through Web-Ready, transparent impact measurement through our dashboard, and work on industry standards through VCASSE and Sustainable Technology Week.

Transparency and reporting

Environmental claims without evidence are worse than saying nothing. Every tree we fund is documented. Our Tree Planting Statement details methodology, partnerships, and planting records. The Impact Dashboard shows live data on carbon offsets, website efficiency, and project-level performance.

If an organization tells you it planted trees but can't show you where, when, and with whom, that's a problem. We publish this data because we want supporters, partners, and critics to be able to verify every claim. The data is there. Check it.

Accountability also means being clear about what the 7,144 figure represents. Our planting partners don't just count seedlings on planting day and call it done — they run sample-plot monitoring on the ground, count live and dead trees, and reconcile their reporting against the original project agreements. The number we publish is already survival-adjusted, not a planting-day headline. Reforestation is never 100% successful, which is exactly why we work with partners who do that verification work, rather than counting seedlings and walking away.

What comes next

We are expanding our reforestation work in three directions. First, we are deepening investment in our Tanzania CORE site while evaluating additional CORE candidates — peatland restoration in Southeast Asia is one strong contender because it targets one of the most carbon-dense ecosystems on the planet. Second, we are deepening the integration between our tree planting program and our project-level carbon tracking, so that every website we build through Web-Ready will have its estimated lifecycle emissions matched with a specific, traceable planting allocation.

Third, we are working with our partners to improve long-term monitoring. Planting a tree is the beginning, not the end. The real environmental value comes from trees that survive, grow, and become part of a functioning ecosystem over decades. We are investing in better satellite monitoring, more frequent on-the-ground survival audits, and longer partnership commitments that extend maintenance funding from three years to five.

None of this replaces the harder work of cutting digital emissions directly. But done with honesty and rigor, reforestation is a real tool. 7,144 trees in a single fiscal year is a meaningful step, and our long-term goal is one million trees by 2030. We're more interested in what happens from here.