From Laptops to Landscapes: How Automation is Scaling Forest Restoration

With Fleet and Cloudflare, enterprise-grade security now reaches the forest.

Seventeen years ago, Plant-for-the-Planet began with a school presentation — created on a laptop in a small Bavarian town. That presentation called on children to plant trees.
And they did. From that single laptop, a global movement took root.

Fast forward to today: over 100,000 young people have joined as Climate Justice Ambassadors. More than 92 million trees have been funded through our open-source Forest Cloud. Our Academies now take place in classrooms and remote communities across 70+ countries.

But with that growth came a quiet challenge: technology.

We’ve gone from one laptop to dozens — distributed across continents, languages, and operating systems. All of them are part of the same mission: empowering children in the climate crisis, restoring forests, and building digital tools to scale restoration globally.

When your team stretches from restoration sites in the Yucatán to coordinators in rural India — how do you keep devices updated, secure, and connected, without compromising privacy?

That’s why 2024/25 is the Year of Automations at Plant-for-the-Planet.

Building good software is only part of the story. We also need to run that software — securely, reliably, and efficiently — on the many devices that power our programs. Technology should enable us to scale what we do, so we can do more of it.

Managing dozens of laptops across continents with different systems, donated hardware, and limited bandwidth is a real challenge. Manual setups take time, security stays inconsistent, and troubleshooting drains our capacity. It doesn’t scale.

We needed a better way to manage our devices without compromising privacy.

Here, Fleet comes to our rescue.

Fleet is a lightweight, open-source device management platform that lets us:

• Enroll devices with a click and monitor devices remotely
• Automate software installations and updates
• Maintain strong security standards
• Keep full control of our data

Following a partnership with Fleet, we’ve now migrated all our devices to its self-hosted enterprise solution — from laptops in Europe to field devices in India. Everything is secure, encrypted, consistent, and easy to manage, so our team can focus on what really matters: restoring forests and empowering youth.

Every device we operate is now ready for action — wherever the team is. Just log in with a Plant-for-the-Planet account, and voilà: they’re up and running. 

How does Cloudflare fit in?

Fleet complements our existing Cloudflare Zero Trust setup through Project Galileo, making our secure ecosystem even more powerful. Every device is now:

• Securely enrolled and automatically configured with Fleet
• Connected to internal tools — without a traditional VPN
• Protected by identity-based access, phishing-resistant logins, and network-level security
• Supported with robust email protection

Whether in a rainforest village or a coworking space in Munich, every team member now has access to the same safe, secure, and seamless infrastructure.

This stack doesn’t just protect our team; it empowers them. Whether they’re running workshops, mapping trees, or managing restoration data — when technology just works, they can focus, contribute, and feel part of something bigger.

Because when the right tools are placed in the right hands, forests come back to life, communities find strength, and movements rise.