Birkerød Gymnasium – The Nordic region’s first Ecosia Campus school!
After many months of emails, Teams meetings with Ecosia and conversations with the management at BG, Birkerød Gymnasium has now become the Nordic region’s first Ecosia Campus school. Read here to learn more about Ecosia and Ecosia Campus, and how you can make BG and the planet greener, with your searches from the couch.
The initiative’s early days 5 years ago, Caroline (2nd year) from the environmental committee came across the search engine Ecosia. In 1st year, she presented Ecosia to the environmental committee, and since then the environmental committee has worked intensively to get BG involved in a collaboration with Ecosia, with the ambition of making BG a greener school.
0% billionaires, 100% climate action Ecosia is the world’s largest non-profit search engine that dedicates 100% of its profits to fighting climate change - primarily by financing tree planting projects at the earth’s biodiversity hotspots. Ecosia is B-Corp certified and has helped plant over 200 million trees in over 35 countries since 2009. They are incredibly transparent about their business operations and publish their financial reports online. As a non-profit organization, Ecosia, unlike Google and other for-profit search engines, cannot be sold. Ecosia founder Christian Kroll explains that Ecosia is therefore more or less owned by its users themselves.
Technically, Ecosia makes money every time you click on an ad or a sponsored search result at the top. This is no different from other search engines. The difference lies in how the money is spent. By using Ecosia, you are not putting money directly into the pockets of billionaires who use your searches to finance private airports (as seen with Google, among others) or new ways to avoid taxes. Instead, your searches fund tree projects around the world that are initiated by locals. In this way, Ecosia benefits local communities, biodiversity and the climate.
What is Ecosia Campus? Ecosia has started a project called Ecosia Campus. 40 schools around the world are already part of Ecosia Campus, and have made Ecosia their default search engine. This involves encouraging students and teachers to download the search engine, and installing Ecosia on a school's desktop computers, such as in the school library. But what makes an Ecosia Campus school official is the detailed tree reports. Ecosia Campus schools receive a unique link through which students and teachers download Ecosia. The unique link ensures that the right cookies are set, and you will thus contribute to the reports. The tree reports thus provide a product where the school's climate action can be seen. In this way, schools will receive reports on the number of trees planted as a result of their searches. Using Ecosia's online impact calculator, we can estimate that BG could plant 11,520 trees and bind 144 tons of CO2 after just one year, if 1,200 people participate.
BG – The Nordic region's first Ecosia Campus school Over the past several months, the Environmental Committee, and in particular Ecosia manager Caroline (2nd year), has worked hard to make Ecosia Campus a reality at BG, through several conversations with the principal, IT and Ecosia itself. Finally, it has succeeded! Because BG can now call itself an Ecosia Campus school. Not only that, out of the 40 Ecosia Campus schools, which are mainly English and German, BG is the very first Ecosia Campus school in the Nordic region! We can be proud of that. Principal Claus Reinholdt Campeotto has an ambition that BG will be Denmark's greenest high school. And with Ecosia Campus, we are already on the right track.
Climate action has never been easier – Download Ecosia now Doing something good for the climate has never been easier. Even from the couch, your searches can make a difference. So you can create climate action while promoting a greener BG. If you use the unique link on your mobile phone, for example by scanning the QR code or inserting it into a browser, you will be taken to where you normally download your apps. When you then press “download app”, the correct cookies will be set so that you contribute to the BG tree reports. Searching with Ecosia is perhaps even the easiest way to create climate action, and the environmental committee hopes to get as many people on board as possible. Let's make a difference together. Install Ecosia now!
Scan the QR code for Ecosia on your phone.