It goes without saying that the climate crisis is the biggest issue facing our species right now. Since day one, it’s been important to us to use Harvey as a tool for funnelling essential funds towards initiatives that are helping find solutions. Our contribution might be small in the grand scheme of things, but it means a lot to us to know that we’re trying our best.
In 2020, we went big on the environment. And we’re looking forward to going even bigger in 2021 – and beyond.
Trees, glorious trees
To date, Harvey has donated $35,000 to climate projects that will plant enough native trees and shrubs to store over 700 tonnes of carbon per annum (via Greening Australia). Go trees!
Much of this work was the result of our donations to Greening Australia who, in 2020, planted an unreal 5,362,611 native trees and shrubs across 6,074 hectares of Australian habitat in total. This year, we donated $23,000 to Greening Australia – which is double the donation we made in 2019. We also gave a Christmas gift to the planet via Ecologi of 756 trees, and signed the Climate Act Now pledge.
People thrive where nature thrives.
Greening Australia has been restoring Australia’s unique landscapes and protecting biodiversity at scale through collaborative, science-based programs for over 38 years.
Greening Australia is committed to tackling Australia’s greatest environmental challenges in ways that work for communities, economies and nature; planting millions of native trees and plants, protecting hundreds of native species, and supporting Traditional Owners’ aspirations for restoring country.
Find out more about the important work these legends are doing at: www.greeningaustralia.org.au
Healing starts at home
Of course, we all have our individual parts to play to minimise our impact too. But it can be difficult to know where to begin. While we’re a long way from perfect, we have been trying our best to live our lives in a way that has a lower impact on the planet. We kept it pretty simple to begin with by writing a list of things we wanted to change, and that list has gradually grown. And we’re still learning and improving as we go.
Here are a few ways we’re trying to do our bit at home:
- Using Powershop for carbon-neutral and renewable energy
- Composting and using reusable nappies at home
- Levelling up our backyard veggie garden – so many failed attempts, so many lessons learned, so many delicious tomatoes!
- We sold our second car and ‘down sized’ our Subaru Forester with a compact Honda Jazz
- Using chemical-free cleaning products
- Reducing our meat consumption
- Buying from farmer’s markets
- Offseting our car emissions with GoNeutral
- Recycling at resource centre
- Disposing of batteries and electronics correctly
- Buying (and selling) from Facebook marketplace
One Small Step for Harvey…
Did you know that if 50,000 Australians reduced their personal carbon footprints by just one quarter over the next year, we’d save 250,000 tonnes of carbon?
One of our favourite projects in 2020 was working with One Small Step, an app that encourages this kind of positive behaviour change in climate-conscious individuals by helping them monitor their carbon output in their day-to-day lives. It works a bit like a fitness tracker app, and all of your information is collated and visualised in digestible graphs and graphics.
We helped One Small Step with their original product user testing and, in 2020, branding and marketing strategy and digital campaigns. Over the course of 2020, the app hit 10,000 users (just another 40,000 to go!). We like to think we helped play a small part in that success.
The six areas of this report
Let’s take a look back at the year that was (before wrapping up with some of our goals and intention-setting for 2021).
This is a pretty long article, so we've created an executive summary version here, including a summary of each section.
To keep things simple, we’ve broken this report up into six parts, that speak to six areas that were particularly important to us this past year:
