Cause We Care

It would make a good maths question: if you times three centimes by two, then divide by four and send the resulting number to Madagascar, how many trees are there in Prättigau?
We’ll give the answer at the end.

The Mobility Cooperative takes shared responsibility for the environment. As such, it is working with the foundation myclimate on the “Cause We Care” project. The idea of “Cause We Care” is that Mobility customers can voluntarily pay an additional amount of three centimes for every kilometre they travel, allowing them to take responsibility for the emissions caused by their journey. Mobility doubles each customer contribution, making six centimes per kilometre in total.

Mobility puts three quarters of these donations into its own sustainability projects, for example the purchase of 3’000 electric cars together with parking spaces. In 2023, the project enabled Mobility to fund the additional costs of 32 electric vehicles and the electrification of 32 parking spaces. The objective is to power the entire fleet by electricity by 2030. myclimate invests the remaining quarter in sustainability projects on behalf of Mobility. Mobility is currently supporting one national and one international project. The national project involves securing forest land in Prättigau; the international project is supporting the replacement of wood cookers that are harmful to health and the environment with energy saving cookers in Madagascar. “Cause We Care” is a myclimate programme.

Saving trees in Prättigau

The Prättigau offers much more than just the beautiful Klosters. And the forest does much more than help hungry mountain hikers prepare pieces of cervelat sausage. The forest delays flood peaks and cleans and stores the water in the groundwater. The forest gives animals and plants a home. Last but not least, it also stores carbon. Trees remove carbon dioxide (CO₂) from the atmosphere by storing it in biomass and in the ground. Natural “carbon sinks” such as these are very important for mitigating climate change.

Mobility and myclimate are supporting carbon sinks as follows: Private forest owners are pledging to retain a certain number of trees that they would otherwise be permitted to fell commercially for wood processing as part of forest management. In return, they receive financial compensation in the form of emission reduction certificates. The income is in turn invested in the forest.

Cooking in Madagascar

The international project supported by the “Cause We Care” fund concerns the island of Madagascar. The island’s wildlife and nature is amongst the richest on Earth: roughly five per cent of all animal and plant species in the world live there – and most of them can only be found on Madagascar. The people on the other hand are greatly affected by poverty and around a quarter of inhabitants can neither read nor write. Most of the cooking is done over open fires using wood collected from the forest. For this, one household needs four to six tonnes of wood a year. To help, the non-profit organisation “Association pour le Développement de l'Energie Solaire Suisse” (ADES) produces and sells solar and energy saving cookers, which, when used, help save 50 per cent of coal and 70 per cent of wood.

To date, the organisation has produced half a million cookers, creating 250 jobs in the process. The Swiss success story shows how climate protection initiatives can work in poorer countries – a finding also made by the NZZ, for example.

Let us return to our maths problem from earlier:

in 2023, mobility customers who joined the “Cause We Care” project raised between CHF 46’000 and 65’000 each month, which, over the course of the year, amounted to a good CHF 500’000. This amount was doubled by the cooperative, meaning Mobility has helped raise over a million francs for climate protection causes. And this leads us to the solution to our little sustainability conundrum:

Solution 1:
13’000 hectares of forest in Prättigau are secured through sustainable means thanks to the myclimate project. There are around 1.32 million ha of forest and approximately 557 million trees in Switzerland. The rule of thumb, then, is that 13’000 ha could provide space for up to around five million trees.

Solution 2 (for maths maestros):
More than 500’000 people in Madagascar are now using an ADES cooker. These people require 50 to 80 per cent less wood or coal. According to the rule of three, the project enabled around half a million tonnes of CO₂ to be saved last year. This is about the same amount as 100’000 Swiss residents release on average each year.

Not bad, right?