Your Tomorrow card can do something new: Help building up an ecosystem every time you pay

From now on, with every card payment using your Tomorrow card you will be helping to restore a precious ecosystem and healthy habitats for wildlife in South Africa. Find out how that works and why you will be making an important contribution to protecting the climate here. 

Sustainable banking with Tomorrow means being able to use your money as a lever for a better future on a daily basis. And the easiest way to do that is with your card payments. That’s why we have been collaborating with strong climate protection projects from the outset. Over the last few years, our focus has been on a rainforest protection project in Portel, Brazil. Together, year after year, we were able to protect rainforest and offset a total of 123.372  tonnes of CO₂. And what can we say? Our community is amazing!

Now the time has come for a new project: so, from now on, with every card payment you will be contributing to the restoration of a precious ecosystem in South Africa. This will enable us to restore healthy habitats where they are urgently needed and where the climate crisis is hitting the hardest: in the Global South. 

Tomorrow’s own ecosystem – our new climate protection project

This is a major milestone for us, because we are doing something totally new which wouldn’t be possible without our community. For the new project, we are planting a thicket in the east of South Africa, which will cover a whopping 1,050 hectares in a few years. As a comparison: that’s the same size as 1,470 football pitches. This land has been used for agricultural purposes and is now extremely arid and dry. The aim is to restore the land with spekboom plants. 

The spekboom is a small succulent tree, which can grow up to five metres tall and supports biodiversity restoration. Its roots prevent soil erosion and its leaves help regenerate the soil. In short: this succulent can be very beneficial for the climate and the soil.

The location of the ‘ Spekboom Renaturation Project’ is within the plant’s original growing region in the South African province of Eastern Cape. This farm consists mainly of degraded meadowland and a smaller section of agricultural land with low productivity, which can be found at the upper reaches of the New Years River that runs through the plot of land. 

Why is the project so important and worthwhile?

The landscape of the Eastern Cape has suffered from extreme aridity caused by intense farming and long droughts. To turn these areas back into a healthy ecosystem, we are renaturing them by planting the indigenous spekboom plants. The aim of the project is to create multiple corridors for the biodiversity and the fauna, to restore their original habitat and the biodiversity in the area.

Protecting the climate with every card payment: How it works

So, with the Tomorrow climate protection contribution, you can now say that you are also restoring ecosystems! Whenever you pay by card, the retailer – your local organic store, for example – pays a fee to the bank that issued your card. This is known as the interchange fee. Banks usually use it as a revenue generator. We want to make a difference and use a part of this fee to help protect the climate.

Bought yourself a coffee? Nice – you will be making bathtub-sized contribution to the ecosystem! Treating yourself to a cinema ticket? For that we can make a rainwater tank-sized contribution to the ecosystem. Heading to a festival this summer? That will help us make a whole trunkload-sized contribution to a healthy ecosystem!

By the way: the project isn’t just ecological, but also social! With help from our partner Eco Planet, we can create valuable jobs locally as the succulents need to be planted and looked after and the development of the area needs to be monitored.  

Find out more:

You can find out more about the project here in the Impact section of our website.

Want to know more about the previous project? No problem, just click here.

Have we won you over with our innovative ideas and you want to finally open an account with us? Here’s an overview of all our account models.