Hannah Rose and Elspeth Taylor are two final year veterinary students at the University of Bristol, passionate about making sustainable changes to their lifestyle. They took this one step further, campaigning for change at their university, created via a simple switch that will have positive environmental repercussions.
Caring for animals and caring for our planet come hand in and hand.
Hannah Rose & Elspeth Taylor
“We started the campaign Bristol on Ecosia in our third year of university, after being inspired by students at other universities successfully campaigning for their campuses to switch the default search engine to Ecosia. Having used Ecosia on our personal devices for a while we were really excited about starting the campaign.
Throughout the campaign we collaborated with Bristol SU, Ecosia and Bristol IT services to convince the university that switching to Ecosia would have huge local and global impacts. The University of Bristol was the first university to declare a climate emergency in 2018, incidentally the year our campaign was launched.
Ecosia is the search engine that plants trees. Ecosia uses its revenue, from advertising, to fund tree planting at twenty different projects across the world. The tree projects are chosen in regions where trees are needed most and therefore will have the largest impact. Projects can be found in Peru, Burkini Faso and Indonesia. Tree planting not only has huge environmental benefits through carbon dioxide absorption, preventing excess greenhouse gases building up in our atmosphere, but they also…
- Improve soil health helping farmers produce food.
- Provide an income for communities improving access to education and healthcare.
- Maintain habitats for endangered species, especially when planted in biodiversity hotspots.
Ecosia has planted over 100 million trees, on over 30 thousand hectares of land, in over 10 thousand locations, in 25 countries. Further benefits of Ecosia are that it is a B Corporation and carbon negative, meaning their servers run on 335% renewable energy so searching with Ecosia is not only sustainable but also regenerative. This is why we love using it!
The University of Bristol launched Ecosia as the default search engine on all onsite computers in February 2021, as part of Sustainability Month. In the first month of this change we funded planting of 300 trees, and since the launch of our campaign the University of Bristol has planted over 1500 trees! We cannot wait to see how our tree count keeps rising, especially with the return of students to campus later this month.
Switching to Ecosia is very simple and is available for mobile phones and computers. You have your own personal tree counter, as well as having the potential to have one for an organisation.
Caring for animals and caring for our planet come hand in and hand. We are passionate about developing the sustainable future of the veterinary profession. As students we are in a great position to shape how veterinary medicine provides healthcare that not only benefits our patients, but also reduces our impact on the environment.
We have been inspired reading all the stories of how veterinary practices are making changes to improve their sustainability, through reusable scrub hats, compost bins and innovative recycling. Changing your search engine to Ecosia is just one more way you can make a positive change in your routine to help the environment. There can often feel a lack of simple sustainable options within veterinary practice, but switching to Ecosia on both your personal and work devices is an achievable step towards a greener practice. It’s brilliant being able to monitor how many trees your searches have funded and to be able to appreciate the impact you are having whilst at work.
We have both been working to reduce our personal environmental impact and want to continue this in our careers. Following on from our university campaign, as we head into work it would be brilliant to carry on spreading the word about Ecosia to fellow professionals.”
You can switch to Ecosia here: https://www.ecosia.org/
To find out more about Ecosia go here: https://ecosia.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/categories/200735011-About-Ecosia
Follow our journey and get in touch on: https://www.instagram.com/bristolonecosia/
