HiRoad Zero and Trees for the Future (TREES) are working together to help drivers reduce their carbon footprint by planting trees.
Driving is a major contributor to climate change. A typical passenger vehicle emits about 4.6 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year. Driving more mindfully and planting trees can help reduce a driver’s net-carbon footprint.
HiRoad Zero is an app that gives you a driving score and estimates your car’s CO2 emissions. It uses the technology in your smartphone, such as your accelerometer and GPS, to measure your driving. The more mindfully you drive, the more trees you’ll earn.
We work with TREES to plant the trees. The trees absorb carbon from the atmosphere and use it to grow. There are no costs to users of the app for this service.
When trees die, the carbon they absorbed gets released. Our goal is to replace every tree planted as the trees mature to keep the CO2 captured out of the air. HiRoad plans to make this possible by committing additional money towards investments so the expected interest earned should allow us to plant a new tree about every 15 years for every tree we plant today. We call these Forever Trees.
TREES is an international development nonprofit that meets a triple bottom line by planting trees to achieve: poverty alleviation, hunger eradication, and healing the environment.
They use a simple and scalable system called The Forest Garden Program to plant and maintain trees. Farmers are trained to sustainably revitalize their land with provided seeds, tools and materials to grow trees and a variety of crops to increase their income and food security.
The trees are currently planted across five countries in Sub-Saharan Africa: Cameroon, Kenya, Senegal, Uganda, and Tanzania. Since we are addressing CO2 totals globally, planting trees anywhere will help bring the total down.