With the current pandemic affecting the whole world, Earth Day will look much different than year’s past. Although there will not be any events, fairs, or rallies, we still have an opportunity to celebrate our Earth. Since 1970, Earth Day has reached millions of people around the world, symbolising the benefits of environmental behaviour change. This April 22, 2021 marks the 51st anniversary of Earth Day.

With this year’s Earth Day theme “Restore the Planet’, it’s more apparent now than ever that collectively we can do this. We’ve experienced the skies without planes, we’ve marvelled at our local wildlife as they reclaimed empty cities, got our hands dirty growing vegetables, growing more plants and connecting with the things that are important.

Despite the pandemic, there are lots of ways that we can celebrate this day and one of them is by doing it virtually.

We’ve listed down some amazing apps from the App store for your kids and the entire family. So check them out and have a great Earth Day!

Apps for Kids:

Teach budding environmentalists to care for the planet by learning the science behind our Earth with these fun, interactive and educational apps.

• Discover how the planet works with Earth Primer, an immersive, beautiful experience that gives kids the opportunity to create volcanoes, sculpt mountains and control the forces of nature with your fingertips.

• All The World: explore + learn – a weekly show and video library, featuring inspiring videos for children 4-10 years old. The 5-12 min videos explain how the world works and challenge kids to explore. It’s entertaining and fun, while furthering children’s social intelligence and innovative thinking.

• How It Works? is a very entertaining didactic application that gives the children the opportunity to explore how our world works through animations, small explanations, games and locutions. It includes small lectures that teaches them about the plants, the energies, the volcanoes, the planet and its interior, the water’s cycle and many more natural phenomena.

Sustainable Living

Cultivate Earth-friendly habits that are good for you too with apps that remind and encourage you.

• JouleBug  is a great app to make your everyday habits more sustainable, at home, work, and play. It provides daily challenges that make saving energy and reducing waste fun. Get rewarded with points and badges each time you log an action such as recycling, refilling a water bottle and more.

• Habitify: Habit Tracker, designed to motivate you every day and reward you with beautiful streaks. It helps you form habits that actually stick and offers insightful charts to help you visualise your progress as well as daily performance and yearly reviews. If you’re an Apple Watch user, the app also works seamlessly across platforms.

Reduce Waste

Make the most of everything you’ve got, and minimise your environmental impact while living better too.

• Turn your pre-loved items into someone else’s treasures with marketplace apps like Carousell. Declutter your closet, room, or home by putting them up for sale finding a new home for your pre-loved items!

• Uneaten food that ends up in landfills is one of the biggest sources of greenhouse gases. Yummly offers step-by-step guides, including video tutorials as well as zero-waste recipes which challenge and guide you to being more mindful about planning your meals to avoid food wastage.

• You can also go green by going vegetarian and explore healthy, plant-based recipes with Oh She Glows, featuring New York Times bestselling cookbook author Angela Liddon where shares her most popular plant-based recipes from the award-winning recipe blog, OhSheGlows.com. One thing is for sure, this healthy recipe app will have you glowing from the inside out and bursting with cooking inspiration!

Plant Trees & Reverse Climate Change

Make a real difference in the physical world while using these apps that plant actual trees around the world on your behalf, reversing damage done to the environment.

• Can’t stop scrolling? Forest is a productivity app that helps eliminate digital distractions and enhance your productivity in a fun and easy manner: plant a tree when you need to stay focused, and if you commit to your task, your tree grows; if you can’t resist temptation to use your phone, your tree dies. Beyond this, Forest works with a real-tree-planting organisation to plant real trees on your behalf so you can focus on what’s important in your life while also keeping our environment green.

• You can also plant trees with your searches and reverse the effects of climate change by using Ecosia, a search engine with a difference. Like most others, Ecosia makes money from search ads, except they channel their profits to plant new trees where nature and people need them most.