In public, the 22,9 million trees financed and planted by Plant-for-the-Planet through donations are often confused with the trees mobilized by the Billion Tree Campaign.
In December 2006, the Nobel Peace Prize winner from Kenya, Prof. Wangari Maathai, together with UNEP, called for the Billion Tree Campaign. On a website, people could report how many trees they had planted. Many companies, government organizations, citizens and also students participated and reported the trees. One of the students was Felix Finkbeiner.
There was no money involved, it was about mobilization. When Prof Wangari Maathai died in September 2011, UNEP transferred the Billion Tree Campaign in December 2011 to the Plant-for-the-Planet Foundation initiated by Felix Finkbeiner and established by his parents. At that time, the Billion Tree Campaign had already mobilized 12.5 billion trees.
However, the technology was at the level of 2006 and the security controls were relatively error-prone. Thus, despite the verification process and the submission of evidence of entries of 10,000 trees or more, jokers were able to bypass these processes and make fun entries.
Therefore, in 2015, Plant-for-the-Planet decided to stop actively promoting the Billion Tree Campaign and instead work on a new concept for a Trillion Tree Campaign, the current plant-for-the-planet.org platform. On this, trees are only counted with the time of the donor’s money transfer.
Transparency report page 15 and 16: https://bit.ly/3zmEbQF
