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January 08, 2018 3 min read

Diana Chaplin
Canopy Director & Eco-Storyteller.

When One Tree Planted was founded in 2014, our primary goal was to make it easier for people and businesses to give back to nature. Since then, we’ve partnered with several companies from individual makers to large organizations, all of whom believe that we can all play a role in keeping our world healthy and green for future generations – especially when doing so is as simple as planting trees.

Today, we’d like to highlight one such partner, VistaJet, to share how we structured the partnership and the progress we’ve made throughout the course of a year.

VistaJet is a private jet airline, serving corporate and political leaders, entrepreneurs, and celebrities who travel often. They fly all around the world, and take pride in the quality experience they offer their clients. They’re also aware that air travel produces carbon emissions, and wanted to find a way to offset this while creating a unique holiday gift for clients. That’s when the VistaJet team decided to plant 20K trees with us, and we’ve allocated those funds to 4 regions across the globe: Colorado, Guatemala, Indonesia, and Tanzania – 5,000 trees each.

Here’s a breakdown of the projects VistaJet helped to fund:

Colorado. We planted a total of 10,000 trees (a variety of native pine species) in 2017 at Sunshine Canyon, Colorado, the site of several wildfires that had occurred there in recent years. 5K of this project was funded by VistaJet, with the rest coming from our amazing donors and additional business partners. Our team was personally there on site, along with hundreds of volunteers. It was an incredibly positive day.

2. Guatemala. We planted 6,000 trees in Osuna and Los Cimientos in Guatemala, with our local partners, The New Roots Foundation, most of which was funded by VistaJet. This project focused on agroforestry and social impact, as most of the trees are planted and tended by local farmers. The farmers are part of a program that incentivizes the long-term cultivation of trees as part of a sustainable agricultural system that offers both environmental benefit and helps the farmers support their families.

2. Indonesia. VistaJet’s 5K trees contribution to this region is part of a larger effort to reforest 70K trees between fall 2017 – spring 2018. At the time of this writing, great progress has been made in growing the saplings, prepping the land, and beginning the plantings, though much of the planting is still to come within the next few months. We partnered with the Friends of the National Parks Foundation for this project, which included hiring local workers and having volunteers as well. The greatest impact of this project will be to create and expand essential habitat for orangutans, proboscis monkeys, several species of birds, and other wildlife. Here’s a progress video to show some of what’s going on!

4. Tanzania. VistaJet’s final 5K will contribute to a spring 2018 planting in Tanzania with the Friends of Usambara Society, with whom One Tree Planted is planting over 60K saplings total, as part of an immense project to plant 15 million trees this year. These saplings are planted in and around a rainforest reserve, with the goal of maintaining biodiversity in a "hot spot,” protecting the local water catchment basin, bolstering erosion control, and involving local subsistence farmers in sustainable agroforestry.

Planting trees is one of the best ways to offset carbon emissions, because trees naturally absorb and sequester CO2, quite literally sucking it out of the air we breathe. But trees also benefit the environment and society in many other ways. Through the projects above, VistaJet contributed to the livelihoods of local people, to restoring burned land, creating cleaner waterways, providing wildlife habitat, mitigating drought and climate change, and to creating more lush, beautiful landscapes for us all to enjoy.

Thank you VistaJet, for making the world a little greener 🌿