With your support alongside our reforestation partners, WeForest and One Tree Planted, we have now reached a huge milestone and planted 100,000 trees across the planet.
In fact, our reforestation partner WeForest has also completed the tree planting stage of its project in the Khasi Hills project in India. As a result, Circular Computing™ has added support to an additional reforestation project, based in the Mara Region of Tanzania.
Through One Tree Planted, Circular Computing™ has also contributed 15,000 trees to the California Moonlight Project to repopulate the devastated areas after the forest fires; helping to re-claim an important and unique biodiversity hotspot in the process.
Through these partners and projects, Circular Computing™ has successfully completed the planting of 100,000 trees – a cause which needs celebrating. However, it is not always the easiest task to get across the sheer scale of what our 100,000-tree milestone means. “100,000” is certainly understood as a large number but visualising this physically is substantially harder to do.
To best give an idea of the scale: every tree is planted roughly two square metres apart to ensure it has suitable space to grow throughout its lifespan. Therefore, the trees that Circular Computing™ has planted so far take up around 200,000 square metres (2,152,782 square feet) of space. This is equal to just under one and a half times the size of the Pentagon building in Washington DC, or more than double the area of Alcatraz Island, California. On a smaller scale, it is the equivalent of 28 football pitches, including our hometown Portsmouth Football Club’s very own Fratton Park pitch.
This is a monumentous achievement; during their lifetime, these trees will sequester around 12,000,000 kgs (26.5 million lbs) of CO2 emissions from our atmosphere. When you discover that just one metric tonne (1,000 kgs) of CO2 emissions is the equivalent volume of a three bedroom house in the UK, it is easy to see just how much positive impact 100,000 trees will have on the environment.
Moreover, it is not simply just an environmental impact that these reforestation projects are having, they support local communities to restore and protect woodland. The aim is to teach how to farm and harvest sustainably to allow these communities to become financially independent. To ensure the local communities of these projects are the beneficiaries, the socio-economic indicators such as local communities trained and equipped with the tools they need, the number of people directly benefitting, and the income generated are also measured.
These projects look to re-enforce the natural balance of social communities, financial assurance, independence and sustainably viable environments through the starting platform of tree planting. WeForest states: “It’s not about planting trees, it’s about the overall result for the environment and for the people who live there. Regaining ecological integrity to enhance human well-being is key to ensure the forest will be protected for the long term.”
With all of that being said, 100,000 trees are, by no means, where Circular Computing™ ends its journey. We will be working hard to continue toward the sustainability goal of a carbon-neutral IT industry (or even a carbon-negative one!) and, most importantly, to help cool the Earth for people and planet.
Because IT shouldn’t cost the Earth.
