Plant-for-the-Planet Academy

The Plant-for-the-Planet children and youth Initiative was founded in January 2007 and originated from a school report on the climate crisis by Felix Finkbeiner, then 9 years old. At the end of his presentation, Felix put forward the vision that children could plant one million trees in every country in the world to balance carbon emissions. In the years that followed, Plant-for-the-Planet evolved into a global movement. Today, some 100,000 children in 193 countries are committed to the goal. The movement understands its role as being an initiative of world citizens who are committed to climate justice in the sense of achieving an overall reduction of greenhouse gas emissions and a unified distribution of these emissions among all of humankind. Plant-for-the-Planet has had democratic structure since March 2011. It has one elected Global Board it consists of 14 children with representatives from over the world. Since the children took over responsibility for the Billion Tree Campaign from UNEP in 2011, the children have set themselves a new goal of planting 1,000 billion trees worldwide by 2020. With such a giant CO2 storage facility, 10 billion tons of CO2 could be offset, buying us valuable time to permanently reduce our CO2 emissions (one tree can bind, on average, 10 kg of CO2 per year). If every global citizen plants 150 trees by 2020, then this goal will be met. The current tree-count can be followed on the Plant-for-the-Planet website, via our tree counter: http://www.plant-for-the-planet-billiontreecampaign.org/ So far over 14 billion trees have been planted across 193 countries. The worldwide communication campaign of the student initiative operates under the slogan "Stop talking. Start planting.", and in 2010 was honored with a gold award in the social national/international category at the Effie awards for efficient communication. Plant-for-the-Planet is supported by the Global Marshall Plan, AVINA Foundation, the Club of Rome, and Leagas Delaney Hamburg. In Germany, Toyota, Develey Senf & Feinkost and Parador support the training of the children at Plant-for-the-Planet Academies.