What makes Felix Finkbeiner a Global Shaker?
Felix Finkbeiner is an environmentalist whose boyhood passion for planting trees has developed into inheriting one of the largest international tree planting programmes in the world.
At nine years old, in 2007, Finkbeiner planted a tree in front of his school in Munich. His vision was for children to plant one million trees in each country, which would “offset CO2 emissions all on their own, while adults are still talking about doing it.” Within three years, children in Germany had held up their side of the bargain and planted one million trees.
Finkbeiner was then invited to speak at the UN General Assembly in 2011, in which he urged delegates to fight against the climate crisis through concrete actions rather than talking.
He hasn’t stopped fighting, and his campaign has developed into a well respected tree-planting foundation, Plant for the Planet. The organisation is responsible for planting millions of new trees around the world.
The group is restoring 20,000 hectares of degraded rainforest in Mexico, where it has planted 5 million trees since 2015. “We’ve got 100 people there planting, on average, one tree every 15 seconds,” Finkebiener told the Washington Post.
Plant for the Planet inherited a massive tree planting programme, which has become known as the Trillion Tree Campaign, from the United Nations in 2011.
In addition, Plant for the Planet is motivating one million children to become Climate Justice Ambassadors.
Now a PhD student in environmental science at ETH Zurich, Finkbeiner is being supported by environmental scientist Thomas Crowther.
Tags: Climate crisis, Germany, reforestationLast updated: March 20, 2020
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