Ecologi, the new name for Offset Earth

Elliot Coad

Elliot Coad

We’re backing our passion for natural climate solutions and humanity living in balance with our planet.

On Saturday 11th July Ecologi will be the new name for Offset Earth.

Have you heard of BackRub? That was Google until they had a better idea a year after launching. As we approach our first birthday, we’ve also been scrutinising who we are.

Now, the team here loves our current name, Offset Earth, but there have been a few thorns in our sides:

  • We don’t just offset! For example our e-commerce app running in over 300 shops only plants trees.
  • “offset” and “earth” are great for English speaking countries, but as we expand internationally, we need to be as accessible as possible to people all around the world.
  • We want to shout louder about our passion for restoring ecosystems that repair the planet.
Ecologi logo sketch

Finding a new name

In the spirit of our absolute transparency, here’s the process we went through to find our new name Ecologi. The first thing to say is that it was a very difficult and drawn out process. After consulting with our team, advisors, and a handful of our individual and business subscribers we ended up with quite a checklist of requirements that each suggestion would need to fulfil –

  1. A name we like – this is a hard one as every suggestion starts life as being totally alien. Only with time can it sit right.
  2. No trademark clashes – it has to be a name we can use legally across the world.
  3. International – a name that is broadly understood in many languages.
  4. Says what it is – The brand needs to allude to what it is about. When our Climate Positive Workforce stamp is added to the website footers of the world’s businesses, our brand needs to indicate that we are here to benefit the planet.
  5. Great domain available – Ahh, to start an online business twenty years ago; those .com domains are elusive.
  6. Natural climate solutions – you’ll know by now that we’re big fans of repairing the planet by repairing its ecosystems


So we’d arrived at a Venn diagram from hell. And in truth there are a few other factors that could be added, like does the name look good when it’s written, does it suit our current brand, and can you remember it after hearing it just once.

Coming out the other side of this process, we’ve learned a few things:

  • Open it up to everyone – you never know where the next suggestion may come from. And some people might hold the key to why you shouldn’t pick an otherwise great suggestion.
  • Give it the time it needs, it can’t be rushed. We can safely say this isn’t a process we’d like to do a third time.
  • It can’t be random. The name has to mean something, or you’re just feeling empty and no matter how hard you try, it’s just lacking something.

Ecologi

Why would we associate with the word ecology? It’s a beautifully broad term that’s surprisingly underused when it comes to naming things.

ecology n.
the relationships between the air, land, water, animals, plants, etc.

As we race to fix the planet, it is important to take in the whole picture. Carbon emissions are the focus, but it is civilisation that sits beneath that is the challenge.

We’re facing two existential events: global heating and ecological collapse. People, nature, and the health of the planet are entirely bound together.

To truly bring ourselves into harmony with the natural world, we must return to seeing humanity as part of it. Heather Alberro

We are seeking then not to just bring down dangerous levels of CO2 in the atmosphere, but to do it in a way that improves the resiliency of nature, and to find a comfortable place for humanity to sit.

Out of the 80 established climate solutions according to Project Drawdown, natural solutions occupy many of the top slots for capacity. In total, nature’s ability to store carbon can remove an additional 461 gigatonnes of CO2 by 2050. To put that into context, that’s the equivalent to 12 years of global CO2 emissions.

Examples of projects that benefit nature and climate:

  • Restoring our tropical rainforests
  • Planting trees on degraded land
  • Protecting and re-wetting peatland
  • Grassland protection
  • Coastal wetland protection and restoration
  • Seagrass protection and planting
  • Conservation agriculture

With Ecologi, we’ve always had a strong leaning towards restoring nature to repair our planet. We’ll now be ensuring that at least 50% of all funded solutions are the types that will benefit ecosystems and biodiversity.

With the other half we’ll be helping humanity transition to sustainable practices, e.g. funding renewable energy (wind, solar), and providing clean cookstoves to the 3 billion people who cook on open fires.

Future of Ecologi

With this new name our message will reach more people, and in the end that’s our goal. There’s an incredible opportunity when we fund climate solutions on a massive scale, to the extent of avoiding 75% of annual global greenhouse emissions. Find more out about this on our Collective Action page.

As we continue to scale up, so too does our responsibility to get this right. Over the last three months we have been calling out to climate scientists, academics, industry experts and project development innovators to come together and build a climate science committee*. This panel will be the core of any strategic decisions regarding which projects are going to deliver on being high climate impact, low cost, and carried out with local community and ecosystems in mind.

We’re looking forward to backing exciting new natural climate solutions and helping secure biodiversity for the future.

Team Ecologi 🍃

 Sign up to Ecologi today to take meaningful climate action.

*If you’d like to be part of the committee, just pop us an email with your CV and covering letter.

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