We partner with a few charities who do our tree planting for us and until now, the trees are planted where they are needed most. However, a number of our runners have asked for more UK based trees to be planted.

Before now this hasn’t been possible due to one single factor – economics. The cost of planting trees in the UK is vastly higher than planting elsewhere around the world. Even when we work with reputable, community lead schemes, the cost of living is simply less expensive in other parts of the world.

Race costs

We aim to keep our costs in line with other virtual race organisations, but their costs are simply the day-to-day business costs plus the production cost of the medal. No matter what length of race they host, the costs remain the same. At Earthruns, our costs go up with the more trees we plant, and we’ve always believed the more miles you achieve the more trees you should earn. We’re happy we’ve found a good balance for our race costs that makes our organisation viable whilst planting as many trees as possible.

The UK solution

So the UK based trees have given us a head-scratching problem – how can we plant trees in the UK whilst still paying our overheads and making race costs acceptable? We’ve been working on this since we set up and we’ve finally managed to find a couple of UK based organisations that plant trees at a more manageable cost. It has meant that we’ve had to charge a little more for these races but we’re happy to test out this option to see if our warriors will pay more to run for UK based trees. It’s a constant balance of what runners want and the good we can do.

Trees planted anywhere will make a massive impact as they grow. One tree will grow to support many animals and will help fight deforestation and climate change. We don’t mind where the trees are planted as long as they are protected, they are planted responsibly and they promote a positive impact on the local community – but for those who want a more local interest we’re delighted that we now have a UK based tree option.

The UK tree runs are released as part of our area-specific races launching on 31st August. If you wish to be notified, sign up for our new race release alerts.