Posted on December, 03 2009

Those people unable to make it to the Copenhagen Climate Conference this month can still contribute to stopping climate change – by using a new search engine from their own computers.

The same day the conference begins on Dec. 7, web users can start using a new green search engine called Ecosia. The new application, powered by Yahoo! and Microsoft’s Bing search engines, will allow internet surfers to protect about 2 square meters of Amazon rainforest just by clicking on sponsored links.

Although users do not donate any money themselves, the company behind Ecosia will donate at least 80 percent of its income from sponsored links to WWF’s rainforest protection programme in Brazil’s Juruena-Apui region.

“The green search engine is a very modern and inventive method of saving the world climate without a huge effort”, says WWF Germany’s director Eberhard Brandes.

“Every year billions of dollars are being earned in the internet only from advertising revenue”, says Christian Kroll, founder of Ecosia. “There is a more eco-friendly way of using these huge profits: the money should better be used to fight global warming.”

Each click on a sponsored link through Ecosia will provide WWF’s Amazon rainforest with a protected area of 2 square metres. Accordingly, 500,000 users and 1 million searches could save 2 million square metres of rainforest every day, the same size as Monaco.

“If only one percent of global internet users accessed Ecosia for their web searches, we could conserve a rainforest area as big as Switzerland every year,” says Kroll.

Rainforests are highly endangered and in the last 50 years more than a half have vanished. Every year a rainforest larger than England is burned or cut down. Deforestation is one of the most important sources of CO2 emissions in the world.

By using the green search engine internet users also reduce their own carbon footprint as the servers of Ecosia use eco-friendly electricity. The search engine will be tested starting Dec. 3 and officially launched on on Dec. 7t. On the website users can also check how many square metres of rainforest have already been saved by themselves and by the whole community.

For more information and to access the Ecosia search engine, visit www.ecosia.org