Evergreen portfolio

Forest

Planting, restoring, and protecting forests to allow trees to store more carbon

Trees gently swaying in the wind.

Temporary carbon removal

9% of fund spend

Trees are the Earth’s lungs. They inhale carbon dioxide and exhale oxygen. Research shows that Earth’s estimated three trillion trees can contain 30% of all annual human CO₂ emissions.Footnote 1

And yet, we’re cutting them down at an alarming rate of more than 15 billion every year. Since the beginning of civilization 10,000 years ago, we’ve eliminated 46% of the world’s trees. We lose 48 football fields’ worth of forest every minute.Footnote 2

There are one billion hectares of land where we could plant trees without impacting agriculture. This would allow for 1.2 trillion additional trees, which could capture more than 200 gigatons of carbon from the atmosphere, wiping out a decade of the damage we’ve done.Footnote 3

Many organizations are tackling this opportunity through afforestation (planting trees where they’ve never grown before), reforestation (replanting trees where they’ve been cut down), and preservation (protecting existing trees).

1.2 trillion trees could capture more than 200 gigatons of carbon from the atmosphere

Company spotlight

Pachama

Pachama’s CEO and cofounder Diego Saez-Gil was born in northern Argentina, at the base of the Amazon rainforest. He grew up surrounded by trees and was heartbroken to see the deforestation happening in his homeland.

Pachama was his solution to this problem. The company uses satellite imagery and artificial intelligence to accurately measure carbon captured in forests, a process that has traditionally been labor-intensive and inconsistent. Pachama’s technology remotely monitors and verifies forests, providing increased accuracy and transparency for purchasers.

They’ve built an online marketplace of various forest projects from around the world that people can choose to purchase offsets from. Their goal is for tens of thousands of new forest protection projects to pop up all over the planet and for Pachama to be the connector.

Shopify recently launched two options for our merchants and their buyers to offset carbon emissions from their order deliveries. We do this with verified forest carbon credits purchased through Pachama. Shop, our shopping assistant app, offsets the delivery emissions of all purchases made using Shop Pay, and the Offset app allows merchants to offset their shipping emissions themselves.

Read more about Shopify’s commitment to minimizing transportation emissions.

Location San Francisco, CA, USA Founded
2018

“The same way Shopify is democratizing ecommerce, we want to democratize the way that foresters and farmers can access companies and people who are increasingly going to start offsetting their carbon emissions.”

—Diego Saez-Gil, Pachama CEO