The children and youth initiative “Plant for the Planet” has hit the ground.
Several media published critical reports.
Now the Uffinger Foundation wants to improve a few things.
Uffing
- Felix Finkbeiner was never as famous as Greta Thunberg. But years before the young Swede and Fridays for Future appeared on the scene, the 23-year-old founder of the children and youth initiative “Plant for the Planet” was seen as the face of a climate protection movement supported by young people. Lately, the image of the Uffing-based foundation has been scratched considerably. Your skins swim away. Initially, the weekly newspaper Die Zeit published several critical articles. The one from December 2020 was headed "The fairy tale forest", the subheading read: "How the organization Plant for the Planet advertises money for climate protection from companies and private donors with dubious promises and questionable figures."
Stern magazine then carried out its own research.
She has now published this in a ten-page article.
Concerns about the work of the foundation grew.
"In essence, the deficits are the dubious structure of the organization, the controversial scientific foundation, the lack of professional support and the lack of verifiability of success reports." Gruner + Jahr - the publisher in which the star appears - has therefore decided to suspend support for Plant for the Planet for the time being.
He had supported the organization and its idea of planting trees to curb global warming since December 2019.
Payments suspended
In the course of the critical reporting, other companies also distanced themselves. The Bitburger brewery group said according to Zeit that it had already suspended its payments to Plant for the Planet in January. The beverage manufacturer Eckes Granini also withdrew from the cooperation early on. The mustard manufacturer and McDonald's supplier Develey also wants to shut down the cooperation with the Uffinger Foundation for the time being. Remarkable: Because the company was one of the closest partners. Develey managing director Michael Durach is a member of the foundation's board of directors. "The large corporation Procter & Gamble, which had a 'Pampers forest' planted in Mexico at the beginning of the year, as well as the cheese manufacturer Hochland and the Munich PR agency Engel & Zimmermann will also put the cooperation on hold",writes the star on its website.
Felix Finkbeiner, board member of the foundation, did not want to comment on the daily newspaper request. Silke Schuffenhauer, responsible for public relations at Plant for the Planet, asks for your understanding. She points out that the foundation is currently, as announced in her blog, dealing with the processing of all the topics. There you can read about the steps the foundation intends to take to increase transparency. Among other things, a committee of experts is to critically and independently examine the planting planning of the ecologists commissioned by the foundation in Mexico every year. In addition, a so-called TreeMapper app has been developed, through which everyone can see every day how many trees of which tree species were planted exactly where on which day. The foundation plans further steps to get out of the negative headlines."In order to increase the quality of our work, we have significantly expanded our project team on the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico," write Finkbeiner and his colleague on the board, Sagar Aryal.
Check structures
One would like to “review the grown structures and reorganize ourselves structurally.
We will now intensively discuss fundamental structural changes and in the second half of 2021 we will determine which changes should be introduced by the end of the year ”.
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