Marcus Hemsley

“The most important question each of us must ask is, ‘Are we being good ancestors?’” - Jonas Salk (creator of the polio vaccine) The Million Tree Pledge is a collaborative initiative bringing together businesses and individuals to make a bold commitment to plant 1 million trees each in the coming years. Led by a group of established and independent small businesses in the UK, the Pledge has two parts: 1. A commitment to plant over 1 million trees by a specific date (most pledgers have chosen 2025). 2. A commitment to find at least two other pledgers, ensuring that the initiative grows exponentially. Through the Ecologi.com platform, pledgers donate to the Eden Reforestation Project. With the mantra ‘plant trees, save lives’, this charity reduces extreme poverty and restores healthy forests by employing local people (often women) to plant millions of trees every year – thereby creating employment opportunities for disadvantaged groups, while planting trees with a focus on sustainability and biodiversity - such as Mangroves in the Madagascan rainforest absorbs four times more C02 than the average tree. Since 2004 they have planted almost 500,000,000 trees creating 4,850,313 workdays for people in extreme poverty. It is estimated humanity has cut down over 3 trillion trees (almost 50% of the world's total), with a current rate of 15 billion a year being lost. We want to help create a world where hundreds of thousands of businesses and individuals pledge to plant 1 million trees each over the next decade - drawing down millions of tonnes of C02, slowing down climate change and restoring biodiversity to deforested areas globally. Launched this year, we come together under the call to #RiseUpDrawDown, and recognise that as successful businesses, it is our responsibility to do more than simply offset our own emissions. Our aim is to have 1000 pledgers (1 billion trees pledged) by the end of 2021, with the goal of getting tens of thousands by 2025.