Tree Planet is an innovative, social venture company with a smartphone driven campaign to plant trees and provide forest building for general customers and global corporations. They believe that everyone should have the opportunity to participate in the fight against climate change and therefore, Tree Planet’s business helps people to show their care for the environment by allowing them to build their own forests.
Tree Planet’s mission is to create the most engaging means to plant the most trees in the world and their vision is to make green the most visible color on our planet. Tree Planet seeks to address the problem of deforestation because according to the UNEP (2011), forests the size of England (13 million ha) disappears every year; therefore, the company seeks to replace those trees that are lost every year and to coordinate the response of stakeholders (civic society, corporations, NGOs and governments) in effort to combat climate change, desertification, donor fatigue and philanthropic inefficiencies.
According to Mincheol Jeong, co-founder and director at Tree Planet, “Tree Planet creates environmentally, socially, and culturally impactful forests such as anti-desertification forest in China, Sewol Memorial Forest in Korea, and Paul McCartney Peace Forest in DMZ (demilitarized zone between North and South Korea). Star Forest is one of the major products, created over 70 K-Pop star’s forests including EXO, TVXQ, and BigBang.”
The South Korean based company was founded in 2010 after winning 1st place for Social Venture Competition Asia and launching its first official app for the G20 Seoul Summit 2010, which marked the launch of new development agendas to ensure sustained and balanced growth for the global economy in the years ahead. Tree Planet’s business model builds sustainable ecosystem with corporations, governments and NGOs, and with the participation of users for forestation through gaming and crowdfunding. The game consists of mobile applications and web games where game players nurture a virtual tree, and in return, Tree Planet plants real trees and provides feedback about reforestation.
Tree Planet creates revenue through gaming in two ways: first, through In-Game Advertising (IGA), which displays the logos of corporate companies that have sponsored the initiative to combat desertification and sends the advertising fee to NGOs who carry out the planting process; and second, through In-App Purchase (IAP), where users purchase hero characters and certain in-game items required to nurture’s one tree. Tree Planet releases new versions every year which resulted in 1 million game users as of 2014. The latest version, Tree Planet 4, will be launched in collaboration with the global published in the US and China with experts from the mobile game industry, with the goal of reaching 5 million users.
Tree Planet also generates revenue through crowdfunding, where celebrity fan clubs, schools and families participate to build forests. Jeong also stated that TreePlanet provides their customers with a “Customized Forestation” service, which allows anyone to own their own special forest. Many customers, especially many K-pop fan groups from all over the world, build forests to celebrate their favorite star’s birthday or concert dates (starforest.org). There are also many family forests that celebrate the birth of their baby or memories of other family members. Their latest running project is a zero profit forestation campaign called “Forest in Peace” (Memorial Forest), which focuses on war victims and natural or man-made disaster victims, along with their families (sewolforest.org).
To date, 43 forests were built through crowdfunding and the overseas participants increased up to 30% in 2014. TreePlanet’s Crowdfunding platform 2.0 will increase world-wide participation by providing an easy-to-use online system and available forestation site. Tree Planet also records the process of reforestation and provides information and feedback with users through various channels such as videos, blogs, and newsletters.
“Since 2010, 1.1 million people have planted over 550,000 trees in 108 forests across 10 different countries with Tree Planet” (Jeong). Tree Planet has also established partnerships with global corporations, NGOs, and governments while also offering local communities a channel to collaborate and save the planet. Converting all the trees that have planted to date into an economic value reaches 12 million USD, with 350 trees planted per day, and 3,177 tons of CO2 removed per year.
More information can be found at: http://treepla.net/eng/main.html
We would like to thank Mincheol Jeong for his comments about Tree Planet, which have been added to this article.
Written by: Kathleen Emerson, AGS on January 13, 2016