Our world is changing fast – often faster than societies can adapt. The seemingly imperceptible changes to our climate, brought on by the burning of fossil fuels that release carbon emissions, are resulting in warmer temperatures, and a more extreme and unpredictable climate.
These changes have not bypassed Bosnia and Herzegovina. Over the last few decades, the annual average temperature has gone up by 1.2 °C. Over the same period, forest fires, coinciding with record droughts and heatwaves, have caused immense environmental damage amounting to 60 million USD. Furthermore, the afforestation efforts are not fast enough to make up for the economic and biodiversity loss caused by frequent and severe wildfires.
At the same time, general awareness and public interest in the causes and effects of climate change is sporadic and passive. Climate action, as both a concept and an act, isn’t quite understood, and climate urgency goes largely unrecognized.
Inspired by UNDP’s Climate Promise and the traditional connection of the people of Bosnia and Herzegovina to their natural environment, the UNDP Accelerator Lab in Bosnia and Herzegovina set out in late 2019 to explore practical ways in which climate action can be ignited. This is the story of what happened next.
In June 2020, UNDP Bosnia and Herzegovina launched TvojCO2.ba (Your CO2), a digital tool that offers a new way of understanding our climate emergency. It showcases the impact of our everyday lives on the environment and facilitates the planting of hectares of new forests across the country as a means of carbon offsetting and ecosystem restoration. During the three-month campaign in the fall of 2021, the tool enabled the purchase of over 17,000 new trees for natural and urban areas in Bosnia and Herzegovina, that will over their lifetime absorb 20 kilotons of CO2 – which amounts to the CO2 that 10,000 cars on gasoline produce on average every year.
As of 2022, the platform has already attracted more vendors, offers more tree species and expanded its locations, and the public interest in carbon offsetting by planting trees is rising exponentially.
The first phase of the TvojCO2.ba platform consisted of the release of an engaging carbon footprint calculator for individuals and companies, which compared people’s carbon footprint results with the national average and provided a set of recommendations on how to minimize one’s impact on the environment and climate. The goal was first to raise awareness on understanding of the climate urgency.
In parallel, UNDP Bosnia and Herzegovina surveyed the users of the calculator to get a sense of their motivation to take climate action and concrete ways in which they would prefer to lower their carbon footprint. Surprisingly, 100% of those surveyed stated that not enough was being done on climate change and air quality in the country, and that awareness on these issues was very low. Besides separate waste collection, which is correlated with a growing awareness of the municipal waste mismanagement in the country, the second most preferred option for personal and corporate climate action was planting trees.
Safeguarding old-growth forests and planting new ones are among the key ways in which societies can contribute to carbon removal from the atmosphere and the mitigation of negative effects of climate change – such as heatwaves and floods. This was well documented in the “Glasgow Leaders’ Declaration on Forests and Land Use”, endorsed by Bosnia and Herzegovina and a dozen other countries at the COP26 climate summit last year.
Although more than half of the country’s territory is under forest cover, forests in the country are in decline – impacted by wildfires and lack of restoration efforts. At the same time, trees are important carbon sinks, and when healthy, significantly contribute to climate change mitigation. CO2 emissions per capita in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 2021 were estimated to be 6.7 tons. For the capture of 1 ton of CO2 emissions, 50 trees must grow for one year.
Thus, the platform evolved beyond the calculator to give citizens a way to join climate action.
The next step in the platform development was to offer trees for online purchase to allow anyone who calculated their carbon footprint to immediately offset a part of it, and quickly and conveniently take part in maintaining forest health and combating climate change.
Following intensive efforts for over half a year, TvojCO2.ba established partnerships with six vendors across the country. The first batch of partners that offered their seedlings on the platform were either public forestry companies or urban greenery departments of local administrations. This was also the first time in Bosnia and Herzegovina that these types of public companies were introduced to e-commerce, making it available to the entire population of the country.
Users could choose from a wide range of tree seedlings – from less than a dollar for young, common seedlings to more than a hundred dollars for grown-up trees and rare species. In addition the platform offers 17 different species – native species adapted to the conditions of planting locations, and a selection of ornamental tree species used for landscaping in urban environments. What’s more, anyone who contributed could receive a CO2 offsetting certificate.
Each vendor selected a limited number of planting locations, where all seedlings bought through the platform were planted. The pilot campaign included 34 different planting locations, available for review in this map.
Although limited in geographical representativeness, the pilot campaign identified important insights when it comes to planting in forests or natural vs. urban areas and the heightened public interest and mobilization for planting in locations that tell a story (those ravaged by forest fires, or in neighborhoods where someone has grown up).
TvojCO2.ba also expanded its functionalities towards an event organization and management segment. Registered users can, therefore, follow their positive effect on the climate through both the tons of CO2 absorbed by the trees purchased through the platform and the number of hours volunteered for climate action.
A total of over 17,000 tree seedlings were purchased through the platform in less than three months following the launch of the pilot campaign in the autumn of 2021, by 132 individuals and 38 companies. Individuals mostly opted for one or several grown-up and more expensive seedlings to be planted in their neighbourhoods, while companies purchased larger numbers of cheaper ones to be planted in rural areas, resulting in more than 80% of the total trees being bought by the private sector.
All buyers showed a significant interest in the carbon offsetting certificates issued by the platform’s system. Some even gifted them to their loved ones, and companies usually used the certificates for their corporate social and environmental responsibility function and marketing.
While this tool alone cannot tackle the complexity of climate change in our country, it proved to be an important catalyzer for climate action. The trees planted during the pilot campaign alone will absorb over 20 kilotons of CO2 in their lifetime. Also, the newly planted trees will restore a large natural area affected by wildfires, thus contributing to the area’s climate resilience and a boost in biodiversity.
116 mature trees planted in the capital of Sarajevo through the platform will contribute to lower air pollution in the city, cool down urban areas during increasingly warm summers and have a significant aesthetic impact on generally neglected residential areas in the city. However, the most important effect is probably the building awareness of the positive effects of tree planting. Accidently or not, at the very end of our campaign, the Government of Canton Sarajevo announced it will finance the reforestation by planting an additional 500.000 seedlings in rural areas of the Canton.
The first planting campaign by the TvojCO2.ba platform was indeed a pilot campaign: designed and run to demonstrate the viability of the concept and model.
The key result – trees planted through the platform – exceeded the initial target of 5,000 almost four times. However, that was the secondary outcome of this learning journey. The insights collected through the platform, behaviors of vendors and the public when it comes to a “democratized” climate action, types of users and the effectiveness of different communication efforts all paved the way towards: a) an understanding that the concept indeed has genuine value; and b) the forward-looking strategy for the concept’s growth phase.
The growth stage, in 2022 and beyond, is constructed around the following key elements that were recognized as key success prerequisites in the pilot campaign:
Read more about the journey and development of the TvojCO2.ba platform.
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