The world's rainforests are being depleted upwards of 80,000 acres per day, with an overall deforestation rate being 8.5 percent higher in this decade than the 1990s.
In 2015, at the United National Climate Change Conference in Paris, COP 21, multimedia artist and president of Act with Art, Naziha Mestaoui, turned the Eiffel Tower into a growing forest from thousands of heartbeats captured through a smartphone by users around the world which were projected onto the iconic Parisian symbol. The virtual global art project, 1 Heart 1 Tree represented the convergence of technology and art and transformation of a virtual act into a physical outcome.
Since the Cop 21, 1 Heart 1 Tree has planted more than 100,000 trees with 1.6 million people from around the world following the project.
"I'm developing other projects around the same dynamic of technology and activism," said Mestaoui. "With 1 Heart 1 Tree, everybody is invited to be part of the solution of planting a tree, and thanks to technology, participants can see their tree come to life before it is actually planted in the reforestation programs."
"For me, it's essential to reconnect with nature and using technology is a way to draw attention to those issues but symbolically, but it's also a way to show that our technologies can help us reconnect with nature and repair what we are destroying today," adds Mestaoui. "It is a way to reconnect our future with nature."
What if we took the technology we used on a daily basis, like a search engine, and engineered it to have a social impact? On average, Google alone processes more than 40,000 search queries every second which is about 3.5 billion searches per day. So, what if every time a user searched in their browser, a tree would be planted?
This is what Ecosia, Berlin-based search engine, is doing. The company donates 80% of its profits from search ad revenue to support tree planting programs around the world. The company recently partnered with Vivaldi to let users turn their web searches into trees that are planted in the world's most environmentally threatened areas and has planted millions of trees in Burkina Faso, Tanzania, Madagascar and other regions.
"What Ecosia focuses on is quite unique within the search and the entire tech industry: transparently turning profits into trees, measuring success in social and environmental impact instead of financial value," said Christian Kroll, CEO, Ecosia. "The work of NGOs is important and there are many traditional businesses that donate to charity on a regular basis. But to tackle one of the most pressing issues of our time, we need to scale up and harness the power of a global community."
Kroll says Ecosia's self-sustaining business model was tailored to generate as much financial support for tree planting as possible and is part of the company's DNA.
"Without this built-in fund generator, Ecosia wouldn't work," adds Kroll.
This kind of focus pays off. The growth of Ecosia's user base has allowed the company to finance the planting of 30 million trees by the end of 2017. Kroll says if the trend continues, they're on track to plant one billion trees by 2020.
Jon von Tetzchner, CEO, Vivaldi said the company wanted to give their users a chance to make a real difference to the environment just by searching the web. "We believe in putting people in charge of their browsing experience, and by including Ecosia, we give our eco-conscious users easy access to a greener search engine option," added Tetzchner.
Ecosia uses Bing’s technology, enhanced with its own algorithms. Searching with Ecosia, users will see a small tree counter appear in the top right corner of the screen. It shows a personal record of how many trees the user has helped plant using Ecosia. Vivaldi is the first browser with a significant global user base Ecosia has partnered with.
Kroll founded the company in 2009 with a degree in business administration. Kroll is not your standard run-of-the-mill entrepreneur, and from the start, he wanted to create a business model with a positive social impact. After living in Nepal, he created Xabbel, a local search engine that was supposed to help generate funds for local NGO projects. But with an average of four hours of electricity per day, Xabbel didn't work the way it should have. Kroll gave up Xabbel, but the idea for a positive impact search engine remained.
"What unifies us is the conviction that clicktivism actually works and that the power of social business can be used to innovate the tech industry," said Kroll. "Deforestation causes many of the global issues society and the environment are suffering from. Poverty, famines, political and economic instabilities, droughts, pollution and mass extinction are just a few of them. Everyone working at Ecosia believes that a smart tool that empowers users to capitalize on a daily habit can have a huge impact."
The poster for Tree, an immersive VR experience that was featured at the Tribeca Film Festival,... [+]
Experiential storytellers and film makers Winslow Porter and Milica Zec, founded New Reality Co to create experiential stories using a variety of technologies that put the user in the middle of the action.
At the Cannes Film Festival in Cannes, France earlier this month, Porter and Zec were at HP Studios in Cannes to talk about how they created a virtual reality (VR) experience that let the user experience how a Kapok tree grows in the Amazon from a seedling to its demise through deforestation. Tree is an immersive VR experience with no words or dialog that incorporates a multitude of multi-sensory experiences including wind, heat, fire and the smell of the rainforest as you grow as the seedling.
To make this happen, Porter and Zec partnered with 22 companies in four months to produce the experience in just four months which debuted at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year. HP donated their top of the line digital creator PC, the Z840 and Z640 workstations. In the hardware department, they also used NVIDIA, Quado P6000s Graphics cards and HTC Vive for their headset and hand controllers, a haptic backpack. The project also has a partnership with Intel and they worked with MIT Media Lab's Fluid Interfaces to control haptic timings.
In the analog sphere, they used fans and space heaters to generate wind and fire and partnered with International Flavors and Fragrances to create the scent of the Amazon rainforest where the tree grows which is misted around you as you begin to emerge from the soil.
"To make a truly immersive experience, users shouldn't feel the technology they're using, it should be seamless so you believe you're having the experience the tree is having," said Porter. "VR isn't going away. This is the third wave of VR and currently, the most impactful experiences are now location-based, but in the future, these experiences will move into the home."
Zec says that both she and Porter wanted to draw attention to deforestation but felt the only way to do this was to put the user in the place of the tree.
"In order to create a total perspective shift, the user needed to become the tree. Right now, VR is the only medium that will enable the user to be a tree," said Zec. "VR is approached as an isolated experience but through Tree, even though you experience it alone, it's not an isolated experience because it bonds people together."
