There are many ways to lower your carbon footprint, from simply recycling to outfitting your home with solar panels, but there are somethings you mostly can’t avoid, like air travel. The good news is, you can offset your remaining carbon footprint by donating to a group that plants diverse native trees (non-native monocultures are bad for the planet).

In our case, we chose Trees For The Future, a fully vetted nonprofit group that works to replace monoculture farms with Forest Gardens, which provide diverse, native, and food-producing trees. These trees, besides clearing carbon, provide year-round food and income for the farmers, and are therefore far more protected than most tree planting operations, and it really does work. Plus, they provide a handy calculator so you know exactly how much you need to donate to offset your carbon footprint with them.

Trees For The Future can help you easily climb that final step to carbon neutrality, but what about going carbon negative? That’s where Ecosia comes in. Ecosia is a search engine which uses its proceeds to plant trees all over the world, and they have the financial reports to back it up. Using Ecosia requires no monetary commitment, every 45 searches plants 1 tree. I do a lot of searching for work, so I switched the search engine in my work browser to Ecosia, and we have already planted 8 trees after 2 months.

I’ve done the best I can to limit my carbon footprint, I use Trees For The Future to cover everything else, and Ecosia at work to plant a few extra trees. It’s easy to do, and well worth it.