Asia Times - Trees of Profit

Image by IceNineJon via Flickr

By Muhammad Cohen

HONG KONG - Cutting down Asia's forests has for decades been an easy way to get rich. Now a trio of pan-Asian "serial entrepreneurs" hope to prove planting trees can be a moneymaker, too. Paolo Delgado, Paolo Conconi and Victor Yap started Project Oikos last year hoping to profit from concerns about global warming. But their primary goal is to educate Asians about the benefits of tree planting and protecting forests.

The trio launched a website, www.projectoikos.com, where people can buy trees priced at US$10 and dedicate them to loved ones or special events. Buyers get a certificate (save paper and don't print it) that includes the dedication and a tracking number to identify their tree.

Project Oikos is one of several services that allow people to buy
trees for a variety of reasons. Equinox Publishing, a sponsor of WWF Indonesia's NewTrees planting program for corporate customers (see In a haze, Indonesia slows deforestation Asia Times Online, September 26, 2009), recently released My Baby Tree, a smart phone application as a retail version of the NewTrees corporate. Buyers can purchase a tree, locate it via an online map and give it a virtual watering by shaking their phone.

Different from many other online tree planting programs, Project Oikos aims to move beyond the virtual experience. "As we kept on digging we found that while planting trees does make a difference, the reality in this ever growing world is that the act of planting trees alone is not enough to make a substantial change in the world's environment," Delgado, who calls himself the project's creative director, said.

Delgado, a Philippine native educated in the US who worked in China before basing himself in Manila, and Conconi, an Italian citizen who worked with Danone in France before moving to Asia in 1992, germinated the idea over drinks in Beijing last year.

"We are both quite professionally driven and tend to forget things that are not alarmed on our phone calendars," Delgado said. "We were laughing about all of the silly, last minute gifts we purchased for girlfriends, when we forgot birthdays or anniversaries while off on some business trip somewhere.

"Buying a star was one of the most memorable, as it was last minute, reasonable, doable by Internet, and turned out to be hugely romantic - this was back in the '90s. Paolo [Conconi] then said, 'What if we sold trees'?"

That turned out to be a prescient suggestion. "I grew up active in the Boy Scouts, then became an avid mountaineer and scuba diver," said Delgado, whose family links to Boy Scouts of the Philippines (BSP) span three generations. "When you grow up around these influences, you become quite aware of the environment and our impact on it."

Those scouting links led his family's logistics company, Delgado Brothers, to partner with BSP and Coca-Cola on "Go Green", a project to plant 200,000 trees across the Philippines using saplings grown in BSP nurseries. The connection gave Delgado a potential source for trees and a process for planting them. Yap, a Hong Kong native who has worked with a variety of multinationals, joined the team to provide international marketing expertise, and Project Oikos was born.

The name Oikos traces to ancient Greece. "Oikos was the basic family unit, the shared center of an individual's world," Delgado explains. "In today's globalized world, we believe the environment has become our modern oikos. It is the center of our world, and we all should care for the well being of our shared oikos."

"Everyone is screaming about the environment and how we need to reduce this footprint, recycle that plastic, but for a lot of the developing world - particularly Southeast Asia - there is not enough information out there for individuals to understand exactly what the problem is and what they can do to assist ... This is why at Project Oikos we put a focus on developing an experience that we hope can change mindsets."

Down and dirty
Project Oikos doesn't only want participants to buy trees, it wants them to pick up a shovel and plant them as part of events it stages to build public awareness. "We involve local environmental groups, so that they too can gain some exposure and be part of the resource group that the public has access to," Delgado said.

Because trees absorb carbon wherever they grow, plantings don't need to be in wilderness areas. "There is that saying, 'if a tree falls in the woods and nobody hears it ... ' [and] similarly, 'if a tree is planted and nobody knows it ...' Planting areas need to be in line with our focus on creating awareness," Delgado said. "We try to pick high visibility areas that can generate media impact as well as drive up participation."

For example, in the Intramuros area of Manila, Oikos staged plantings following a scandal that revealed decades-old trees were cut there. Another large planting took place at Manila's Smoky Mountain, the former central garbage dump that was transformed into a low-income housing area.

Planting events have been held in several areas of the Philippines and Malaysia, where co-founder Conconi now lives, in partnership with environmental groups, schools, community organizations, government and publications. Conconi says Project Oikos hopes to expand its base of corporate clients to build joint marketing campaigns. Targets include high profile polluters such as airlines, using trees to offset carbon emissions from passengers' travel.

"We feel that Project Oikos is a great CSR [corporate social responsibility] investment," Delgado says. "With the global financial crisis still reverberating through most companies, we offer an inexpensive alternative to traditional corporate gifts; we can be a part of company-client bonding experiences, and we fulfill CSR requirements."

Although it's traditionally non-profit organizations that offer CSR programs, Oikos' partners decided to make theirs a for-profit venture. "What we knew that we wanted was the ability to run Project Oikos like a business, with good professionals at each location for the activities," Delgado says. "We wanted it to have the freedom to invest in local organizations that were already in existence and making a difference in their own way.”

"We also felt that it would be wonderful to someday have Project Oikos work like a sort of investment fund, where MR = MC [marginal revenue equals marginal costs; the point at which profits are maximized], where we are answerable to investors for returns and growth,” he said. “It may be developing awareness today, but perhaps something related but different tomorrow. In this way, we keep ourselves sharp and efficient. I guess with these sort of ideas, a for-profit was the best way we knew how."

Project Oikos' founders are looking to clean up in every sense, and, everyone, including Mother Earth, can profit from their success.

Former broadcast news producer Muhammad Cohen told America’s story to the world as a US diplomat and is author of Hong Kong On Air, a novel set during the 1997 handover about television news, love, betrayal, financial crisis, and cheap lingerie. Follow Muhammad Cohen’s blog for more on the media and Asia, his adopted home.