Treedom is the name of the concept whereby you, with a simple push of a button, make sure that a tree is planted thousands of miles away. It is a bit like the former Foster Parents Plan, where a donor remotely helped a child and its community in a developing country. Through that, you gained a foster child, who also wrote you a letter from time to time.
It’s not just a sapling that is planted, but a farmer is being funded too.
Treedom’s trees obviously do not write (back), but agronomists from the organization on site take a picture of the sapling and record the coordinates of each individual tree. Every tree is assigned its own unique tree ID and is entered into the public records. It’s not just a sapling that is planted, but a farmer is in fact funded to plant a tree and be supported until the tree is productive.
Valentine’s Tree
This is being done on a grand scale. Those who buy/adopt a tree are funding farmers who want to plant trees and are supporting their work for the first few years, a time when the trees are not yet productive. Treedom provides farmers with expertise and technical support in planting and managing trees. This includes first building a nursery, growing seedlings, planting the plants and then caring for them.
Specially for Valentine’s Day, the organization behind Treedom has selected a package of ten trees and associated ten different ‘ingredients of love’ with them. The ingredients are intended to form a personalized love story that the buyer gifts to their partner. Naturally, this is a story to boost sales, but the idea of an innovative gift is not lost. Moreover, an Italian company has every right to use Valentine’s Day for its marketing. After all, the saint after whom the day is named hails from Terni in Umbria.
Treedom was founded over a decade ago in Florence, Italy, and has since commissioned 1.7 million trees to be planted in countries such as Cameroon and Colombia. It is the only European country that is also planting trees in Italy. Treedom redevelops land seized from the mafia and thereby promotes organic farming. The project has since led to the reduction of 400 million kilograms of carbon dioxide emissions, or at least that is the amount of CO2 that the trees have removed from the air.
Tree prices range from 19.90 euros for a Rubiaceae coffee plant in Nepal to the Valentine’s package of almost 200 euros. Monthly subscriptions are also available and you can purchase a tree via the website or app.
Read also about how Ireland is tackling reforestation on a grand scale.
Or how trees are trees are being incorporated into apartment buildings in Milan.
