Tackling the Climate Emergency with Maxime Renaudin

As part of our aim to celebrate the power that tech has to make the world a better place, we’re planting a tree for every nomination we receive in this year’s awards through our friends at Tree-Nation. To find out more about the organization and their mission to help tackle the climate emergency, we spoke to CEO Maxime Renaudin.

Can you tell me a little about your work with Tree-Nation? What do you do and what are your aims?

Tree-Nation’s mission is to reforest the world. Through the Tree-Nation platform, we aim to bring a technological solution to deforestation, responsible for about 17% of all climate change emissions.

We want to use technology to make tree planting easy and provide support, advice, and solutions to citizens and companies to help them transition towards a sustainable future.

Your aim is to plant one trillion trees by 2050: how close are you to achieving this aim?

We consider the one trillion trees milestone to be sufficient to put a full stop to the continuous worldwide loss of trees. Therefore, we have defined a yearly objective to plant 19,000,000 in order to achieve our goal by 2050. This year we have planted more than 8,000,000 for a total of almost 24,000,000 trees planted. We know our aim is high, but not crazy.

Why is your work so important?

Our purpose is to provide an essential solution in the fight against climate change. Planting trees is recognized as the cheapest, easiest, and best-understood mechanism for carbon storage, and it has been recognized by the scientific community as a vital pillar in tackling climate change. Besides, our work at Tree-Nation has also a social-economic impact.

Can you tell me about the type of communities you work with?

We work with communities all around the world as we seek to plant trees and engage in conservation projects where trees are most needed and will have a positive impact on the local environment, the local populations, and the climate. Our different projects worldwide strive to support reforestation, conservation, education, gender equality, environmental awareness, and more.

How do you harness the power of technology to achieve your goal?

The Tree-Nation platform is a digital solution. Our technology is simple: a web platform to fund reforestation. In other words, we see our platform as a link between humans and trees. So technology plays a very important role in accomplishing our goal.

Do you think tech has the power to work for the greater good?

Of course – solar panels and batteries will solve our energy pollution, electric vehicles will solve our transport pollution, and our intention is to solve deforestation through our platform.

What are you most looking forward to for this year’s Digital Revolution Awards?

At Tree-Nation we make tree planting easy so that change happens. Planting trees for every nominee will not only demonstrate this, but also encourage others in joining our mission and contributing to the world. It takes both citizens and companies to solve climate change.

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