In response to an SU-led campaign, the University has decided to change the default search engine across all managed devices to Ecosia. The change will take place this week and is in line with UEA’s commitment to tackling the climate and biodiversity emergency and further enhance the sustainability of the university.

You may have heard of Google and Bing, but have you heard of Ecosia?

Ecosia is the world’s largest non-profit internet search engine. It functions just like Google but with a key difference: it uses ad-revenue generated by searches to plant trees. Since it was founded in 2009, Ecosia searches have funded the planting of 110 million trees in 31 biodiversity hotspots around the globe. These trees mitigate the climate emergency and tackle the biodiversity crisis, sequestering carbon and providing habitat in some of the most biodiverse yet threatened ecosystems in the world.

Switching to Ecosia will fund the planting of trees while maintaining the functionality and accessibility of alternatives such as Google and Bing. This way, UEA can make a positive environmental impact with a relatively small change. Users who don’t want to keep Ecosia as their default search engine are free to change it back to whatever they prefer.

As always, if you have any questions you can contact me on my Facebook page or by email.

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