Christian Bergius, Country Manager DACH, Ecotree
Interview:
“Hello, my name is Christian. I am country manager for the German speaking countries at EcoTree. With EcoTree, we restore European forests and biodiversity with a model which actually values nature and shares this value with companies.
Basically, we all like nature, and yet it’s being destroyed at a very alarming rate, as we know. So what we do is we flip the coin and have a business case to value nature and to restore it here in Europe where the need to do so is very big.
What it looks like is that we buy lands which are, for instance, agricultural lands or destroyed lands. We build forests and we let companies actually own the trees. What this means is that as a tree owner, you can capture the CO2 and have the certificates from qualitative projects here in Europe.
You contribute to biodiversity here at home with forests you can actually visit. And obviously because you own the trees, you will receive a very long term return from the sales of sustainable timber from the forests.
So from a company perspective, what this means is that you have a self-financing CO2 sink or self-financing CO2 carbon removal, which we think is pretty much a no-brainer.
The model has worked very well in France, where we are from. Started in 2016, developed then the UK, the Nordics, the Netherlands, and we’re now here in Germany, Switzerland and Austria looking for like-minded companies, companies which have to or want to make a positive impact and want to do so with qualitative projects.
The French tech obviously for us makes sense. We are a French company. I have been part of a French school in Berlin, so the Franco-German link is very strong. So yeah, that’s that’s why we’re here as well.”
