Help Protect Earth Plant 100k Trees this Winter!

Every autumn/winter my charity Protect Earth plant as many trees as we possibly can to fight the climate and biodiversity crises.

In the past our limiting factors have been finding land appropriate for reforestation, both working with existing land owners, and buying our own land, but now we've got a bunch of our own land and more landowners than we know what to do with.

When possible we work with government grants to get taxpayer money being spent on solving the problem, but as that often gets us stuck in broken government pipelines waiting a few years for approval we often sidestep all of that by doing lots of smaller projects all over the country that fall below the threshold.

Over the last four years we've managed to get 100,000 trees planted, which has been an uphill battle, but the one thing that had always been easy has been funding. We have just been running around the country, meeting farmers and landowners in need of help, getting on with their projects, and planting as many trees/hedgerows/shelterbelts as we damn well could in the planting season (between November and April.) We worry about trivialities like who is going to pay for it all later.

This was obviously not going to last forever, but for the first four years it was fine, our amazing partners Ecologi covered 90% of the trees, and other techies-gone-reforestation startups like Reewild and Pinwheel have picked up the difference.

However, with 100,000 trees to plant this winter, I've overwhelmed them all, and we'll need a lot of help to find the funding for spade ready projects across the UK. The charity literally does not have the money in our bank account to order these saplings right now.

Sponsor a Tree/Hedgerow

Over the last year I've enhanced our "Tree Tracker" backend to allow for Shopify purchases. It's been a long road for various reasons (like having to run off to the woods to install some fencing and fell a bunch of invasive species) but we've got it done, and you can see the shop over here: https://shop.protect.earth/

For now you can sponsor a tree, or sponsor a bunch of trees, and they're discounted to 40% of the usual cost right now to help us clear a backlog. We have 11,500 trees unfunded from last season, and they were pretty cheap as we didn't need to use guards/stakes, so if you can sponsor some of those I would bloody love you for it. You'll get a certificate emailed directly to you from our backend as soon as the order is fulfilled, which will be within 24 hours.

Corporate Sponsorship

Protect Earth has a few corporate tree sponsors, who pay for 1,000-10,000 trees directly with us. Using the same setup as above, but by skipping the Shopify store, we can do awesome things like send one or more trees to each of your employees, or each of your customers.

This can be done via a spreadsheet where you put how many should go to what name and what email, and we'll handle the rest for you.

There are projects in need of support all over the country, literally 60,000 trees that currently have no funding and might need to be postponed to next year if we can't find it. There's no time to wait and we'll have more to do next year anyway.

Prices are generally £4 (£1 for guard, £1 for stake, £1 for tree, 50p "insurance" to replant failures, 50p for staff) but some projects are cheaper and less risky than others. One of these is as cheap as £1/tree, due to not needing guards or stakes due to deer numbers being managed in the surrounding areas.

If you can sponsor larger chunks of these trees please get in touch, and we can help your company do something amazing for the reforestation efforts in the UK. We aren't selling carbon credits for these but we can give you an idea of the vague carbon sequestration over 50 years if you'd like to have some context on the good you're doing.

None of us are rich

If you aren't able to help financially we've got a lot of tree planting projects coming up across the country, and we're even getting up to Scotland for the first time ever! Please come and volunteer, and I'll make you tea/coffee on my kelly kettle and make sure you're full of biscuits.