90 FOOTBALL FIELDS DEFORESTED WHILE YOU READ THIS POST

Did you know that every year, around 5 million net hectares of forest are lost around the planet? To put that number into perspective, that’s 18 football fields of net deforestation every minute or 90 of them while reading this post. Pause for a moment and picture that.

Something else to think about: according to Statista, over two billion people worldwide made purchases online in 2020, for over US $4.2 trillion. If we consider an average purchase of say, $42 (for argument’s sake) that would be 100 billion transactions per year. Park that for a second.

Before I get to where I’m going with this, I first want to say that planting trees is about so much more than capturing carbon from the atmosphere. It’s about ecosystems, wildlife, clean air and water, soil quality, and more.

But let’s consider the big question on our collective minds: greenhouse gas emissions and climate change.

500 BILLION TREES

A 2019 study published in the journal Science concluded that the Earth could support another 900 million hectares of forests, an increase in tree cover of around 25 percent. That’s equivalent to 500 billion trees, and it would sequester roughly 205 billion metric tons of carbon, reducing atmospheric CO2 also by an estimated 25 percent. That would cancel out about half of all carbon emitted by human activity since 1960, according to the study—one meaningful strategy among many others required in the fight against climate change.

So, going back to those ecommerce transactions, if we planted 1 tree for every online purchase, we could achieve the above numbers within just 5 years! A tenth of those transactions? 50 years. Still remarkable. And remember that we’re leaving out all transactions at retail here, which still account for the vast majority of purchases.

I’m not going to say the above study was perfect, or that it didn’t face any questions or spark a healthy debate on the topic, or that it would be possible for every type of ecommerce order to result in a tree being planted—but let’s not split hairs. The bottom line is that connecting consumption with environmental remediation, in this case planting trees, can be an extremely powerful, self-scaling tool to fight climate change and better our environment.

SMARTER CONSUMPTION

When we developed our vision for Landish, our main objective was, and still is, to make it easy and enjoyable for conscious consumers like you to integrate the world's smartest ingredients into your daily wellness routine. We mean smarter for your health and for the planet. The first part is about maximizing nutrition and functional benefits for minimal resource use. The second part is about acknowledging our footprint and giving back to the environment.

ONE TREE PLANTED

This is why we partnered with One Tree Planted, a non-profit organization based in Canada dedicated to planting trees around the world on behalf of people and businesses.

One Tree Planted has reforestation projects across North America, Latin America, Asia, Europe, and the Pacific. Since 2014, the organization has successfully doubled the number of trees planted from the previous year. And despite having to drastically change its operations due to the Covid-19 pandemic, it managed to plant 10 million trees in 2020 and is aiming for 15 million in 2021.

LANDISH’S OBJECTIVE

We decided to keep things local. For every order on this website, one tree is planted in Canada, helping to offset our collective environmental impact—and also an opportunity to create tree planting jobs in Canada and reinvest in the local economy.

To ensure that our impact is preserved for years to come, all of the reforestation projects that we support are located in protected areas that cannot be harvested for lumber, mined, developed, or cleared in any way.

So far, we’ve planted over 50,000 trees and, with your help, we plan to reach 1 million!

BC WILDFIRES AND THE CHILCOTIN PLATEAU PROJECT

Why plant there?

In 2020, all orders on landish.ca went towards supporting the Chilcotin Plateau project in Quesnel, BC, a forest area that was severely affected by the 2017 wildfires.

Forests cover two-thirds of BC, providing a home to iconic wildlife like grizzly bears and moose. In 2017, these habitats faced the largest wildfires in BC’s recorded history, with damage spanning close to 550,000 hectares (roughly 50 times the size of the city of Vancouver).

The loss of forest from the wildfires has had a detrimental impact on the soil, ecosystems, wildlife, and water quality in these areas. The damage also deeply affected the surrounding communities, including indigenous groups who rely on the land to hunt and gather food.

Chilcotin Plateau Project Scope and Objectives

The focus of the Chilcotin Plateau project is to rebuild over 600 hectares of forest area by planting almost 700,000 trees. Due to the lack of seed trees remaining, regrowth would take up to 40 years to occur naturally (i.e. with no intervention).

Beyond sequestering more carbon sooner, reforestation will help to:

• Make the forest more resistant to disease and future wildfires, by introducing a variety of tree species—Douglas fir, lodgepole pine, hybrid spruce, aspen, and larch—that are known to adapt to the changing climate.

• Reestablish ecological communities and biodiversity among plants and animals much faster than it would naturally occur—restoring the natural habitat of a wide range of animal species, including deer, moose, black and grizzly bears, wolves, sandhill cranes, songbirds, and small mammals

• Improve the health of the soil and reduce the likelihood of landslides, as wildfires can cause soil instability and erosion by removing the top later and altering the soil’s physical properties.

• Improve the quality of the water in the surrounding area, as the intricate root systems of trees act like filters for pollutants.

As you can see, sequestering carbon from the atmosphere in the fight against climate change is only one among many interconnected environmental benefits associated with tree planting.

ABITIBI PROJECT IN QUEBEC

Landish orders on our French language website (fr.landish.ca) support a reforestation project in the Abitibi region of Quebec. The province’s forests (mostly Boreal) are home to some of the world’s richest ecosystems, housing a wide variety of plants and animals including moose, black bear, fox, and caribou. The project aims to reforest land throughout the municipalities of Abitibi-Temiscamingue and the city of Rouyn-Noranda, which had been cleared for agricultural use but was never used. One Tree Planted will be planting 90,000 trees in the spring of 2021 to restore these lands to their native states.

2021 REFORESTATION PROJECTS

This year, Landish orders will continue to support reforestation projects in BC and Quebec. However, we will also be expanding our impact to support in-need projects across Canada, including:

• New Brunswick: The Chignecto Isthmus forest restoration project will help to protect the ecological connectivity that sustains Nova Scotia’s wildlife, including the moose population, which is at risk of going extinct.

• Nova Scotia: The Victoria Municipal Park project aims to restore a forest area that was attacked by insects, in addition to land that was previously used as a municipal dump.

• PEI: The PEI National Park project will restore an area on the north-central side of the island that was damaged by Hurricane Dorian in 2019.

Thank you for your continued support in helping to restore Canadian forests! We look forward to sharing the impact of these projects with you throughout 2021. To learn more about One Tree Planted’s reforestation efforts, visit their website.