How An Nhi Sequestered Carbon by Planting Trees

A project grounded in data

An Nhi had been interested in climate action since middle school, but she wanted her Ámaxa project to be measurable — not just meaningful. When she found a local reforestation nonprofit that tracked carbon sequestration by species and location, she knew she had found her partner.

Over three months, An Nhi organized four tree-planting events at sites identified by the nonprofit. She recruited volunteers from her school and trained them on proper planting technique before each session. By the end of the cohort, her team had planted 340 trees — enough to sequester an estimated 17 tonnes of CO₂ over their lifetimes.

Making the invisible visible

The part An Nhi is most proud of isn't the number of trees. It's the data dashboard she built to make the project's impact visible to her school community. Students can look up the exact GPS coordinates of trees they planted and see the projected carbon impact update each year as the trees grow.

"A lot of climate projects end and then nothing happens afterward," she says. "I wanted ours to keep doing something after I stopped watching it." The dashboard is still live, still updating, and the nonprofit has since used An Nhi's model to design similar tracking tools for other volunteer campaigns.