Did you ever want to plant a tree to help make the world a better place? How about planting a whole forest? Big forests or small forests, there is a startup called Reforestum trying to assist you with that.
Diego Sanz Prieto is a software engineer from Spain and the founder of Reforestum. Their app is planned to let you design your very own forest like if it was a simulation game. But this time it gets real. They take your design and the “Forest Engineers” take on implementation.
After that, it doesn’t stop. According to the current roadmap, you will be able to use the app to check onto your forest via satellite image and order extensions if you want to grow further.
Like this, you can have a whole lot fun and do something good for our environment. The target is not only to live carbon-neutral but carbon-positive. You can help the world deal with pollution by adding more trees and forests in designated forest extension areas around the world.
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For instance, you can go to the Reforestum website, select a location, select how much money you could afford to get your own forest and they will give you their calculations for that right on the spot. I tried that with €300 (roughly $323 US), and they could directly tell me that this would allow them to build a new forest on an area of 100m² (roughly 1076 ft²) and that this would capture almost 18 tons of carbon over a span of 25 years.
They are planning to do this first in Picos de Europa (Spain) but want to extend this approach to other locations such as Borneo (Malaysia), Amazon (Brazil), Chipata (Zambia) and Oregon (USA). Perhaps they will be even able to extend this model further. I’d love to be able to design a forest that is more or less near where I am so I can actually visit it.
The Reforestum team currently runs a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter. You can support them right now and until the 15th of February. Depending on the amount of money you pledge, you will receive a particularly sized forest for you to design and monitor. I found their solution to be neatly designed, and I certainly appreciate the sense to combine design and gamification aspects with projects that help our environment.
YouTube: Introduction to Reforestum
Photo credit: Reforestum
