First 25,000 Trees Planted in Nova Scotia

Cloudflare has planted the first 25,000 trees from its commitment to offset the environmental impact of Bot Fight Mode, its free tool designed to combat malicious web scrapers. The trees were planted in partnership with One Tree Planted (OTP) across 20 hectares in Victoria Park, a 130-year-old woodland in Truro, Nova Scotia.

The planting sites include two distinct areas of the park: one section that lost old conifers to insect attacks, and another that was previously a municipal dump, now covered by a clay cap and topsoil. The project added red spruce, black spruce, eastern white pine, eastern larch, northern red oak, sugar maple, yellow birch, and jack pine to support both reforestation and the park's popular hiking and biking trail network.

The Origins of the Tree Commitment

The initiative traces back to 2019, when Cloudflare launched Bot Fight Mode. The tool was designed to fight back against scrapers and other automated actors by preoccupyng them with computationally expensive tasks. This approach stalls malicious activity but forces bad actors to consume more energy, potentially increasing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. To account for that impact, Cloudflare committed to supporting tree planting projects.

Bot Fight Mode works by identifying bots visiting a site and issuing them a computationally expensive challenge, a tactic known as "tarpitting." This stalls their progress and results in higher server costs for the attacker. The tool targets traffic from cloud and hosting providers, where bots typically originate, while allowlisting well-behaved bots such as Slack and Google.

More than 550,000 sites currently use Bot Fight Mode. It is free and available to all Cloudflare customers regardless of plan, while paid customers can use an enhanced version known as Super Bot Fight Mode.

Calculating the Tree Count

To determine how many trees were needed, Cloudflare modeled bot challenge activity on a high-traffic day. On May 23, 2021, Bot Fight Mode issued 2,878,622 challenges averaging 50 seconds each, totaling 39,981 hours of bot engagement with network defenses in a single day.

Using a generic server power consumption rate of 0.2 kWh per hour, that time converted to 7,996 kWh of energy. An emissions factor of 338.52 gCO2e/kWh then yielded approximately 2,706,805 gCO2e in total emissions. The calculation uses carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e), a composite unit for all six GHGs listed in the Kyoto Protocol weighted by Global Warming Potential.

Based on OTP's estimate that a mature tree absorbs roughly 21 kgCO2e per year, the emissions translated to about 47,000 trees per server, or 840 trees per CPU core. Given the time required for newly planted trees to mature, Cloudflare multiplied its donation by a factor of 25. Over the first two years of the program, this calculation pointed to approximately 42,000 trees needed to account for all CPU cores engaged in Bot Fight Mode, rounded up to an even 50,000. The remaining 25,000 trees are expected to be planted soon.

"Planting trees will benefit species diversity of the existing forest, animal habitat, greening of reclamation areas as well as community recreation areas, and visual benefits along popular hiking/biking trail networks," said Stephanie Clement, One Tree Planted Project Manager North America.

A Broad Sustainability Approach

Reforestation supports healthy ecosystems and biodiversity, but Cloudflare acknowledges there is no single solution to the climate crisis. The company is also investing in renewable energy, providing customers tools to measure their own carbon footprints on the network, and working on projects to offset or remove historical emissions associated with powering its network by 2025. By the time of the first donation to OTP in 2021, Bot Fight Mode had spent more than 3,000 years distracting bots since launch.