We’d love to keep sharing our exciting developments in the Global Good community with you, but you’ll need to ‘opt-in’ to our communications. Read more about how we protect your data here >>
Our Cool Partnership Pays for Tree Protection
For the second year, we are supporting Cool Earth, a charity that backs people to protect rainforest and fight the climate crisis.
For every organisation that enters the GGAs, we make a donation to Cool Earth. The good news is we have raised £1,620 this year, thanks to our highest number of entrants to date.
Karen, GGA’s founder, explains how it works: “For every paid entry we receive from organisations with six of more staff, £10 will go towards sponsoring a tree which is at risk of deforestation for a whole year. All entrants will receive a certificate acknowledging their donation.”
For all entries from smaller organisations (who pay a lower entry fee) we contribute £5 towards the purchase of an Inga bean tree. Native to South America, inga bean trees are low maintenance and easy to grow. Known as ‘Wonder Beans’, they are considered a ground-breaking crop in the fight against climate change – the inga trees help to improve soil fertility and crop yield and provides a sustainable income for indigenous communities in the Peruvian Amazon.
Cool Earth says protecting tropical rainforest is a cost-effective and potent way to fight the climate crisis. Karen continues: “It’s essential that the whole world gets behind rainforest protection. It’s one of the most positive things we can do for the sake of people and planet.”
More about Cool Earth:
Protection Over Planting
With a strong emphasis on protecting existing trees, Cool Earth is working to keep rainforest standing in the three largest global rainforest biomes, the Amazon Basin, Congo basin and New Guinea including forests in Peru, Papua New Guinea and Cameroon.
Only six months ago at COP26, governments and companies committed to stop deforestation by 2030. Yet, in the tropics where forest carbon storage and sequestration rates are highest, the equivalent of 10 football pitches of primary forest was lost every minute in 2021, releasing 2.5 billion metric tons of greenhouse gases (the annual fossil fuel emissions from India).
Our awareness about the extent that healthy intact forests have on the climate is growing all the time:
Carbon and Cooling
Tropical forests can absorb 4.8 billion tonnes of CO2 annually, up to 10% of annual man-made GHG emissions. Forest clearance releases this carbon, doubling the negative impacts of deforestation. It was reported last year that logging and burning of forests in Brazil caused an area of the Amazon to release more carbon that it could sequester. When an acre of rainforest is burnt, this results in 260 tonnes of CO2 emissions – equivalent to what 10,000 people would emit in a day.
In addition to storing carbon, reports of a new study have revealed the wider reaching impact forests have on local and global temperatures and moisture which influences cloud formation and rainfall. Tropical forests keep the temperatures down by 1° Celsius (1.8° F) and forests overall globally by about 0.5°C (0.9°F).
Tropical deforestation immediately increases extreme heat locally and decreases regional and local rainfall which, as we have seen in Brazil in recent years, cause a dramatic rise in forest fires exacerbating the problem further. Preserving tropical forests is a double-win for the climate because they both sequester large amounts of carbon and cool the earth.
Biodiversity
Forests are home to most of earth’s terrestrial biodiversity. A mature tree in the rainforest is central to an entire ecosystem and impossible to recreate quickly and effectively through a replanting scheme. A single hectare of mature tropical rainforest may contain 480 species of trees and thousands of other organisms that contribute to the survival of the environment. We are losing 50,000 species a year to deforestation.
One spoonful of soil in the rainforest contains 10,000 to 50,000 different types of bacteria. Deforestation not only releases carbon but the soil loses essential nutrients and bacteria through run-off, undermining all life that depends on it.
People
There are 1.6 billion people worldwide who rely on rainforests for their livelihoods. Indigenous people depend on the biodiversity in native forests for their food, water and medicines so habitat loss and climatic changes threaten their very survival. Cool Earth supports local and indigenous knowledge to develop innovative ways to address threats to the forest while making communities stronger and more resilient.
If you would like to support Cool Earth’s climate action in raising awareness of the importance of trees as an essential natural solution for the climate crisis, click here.
Cool Earth is a partner in the Queen’s Green Canopy initiative. Read their review of the latest Global Forest Watch report for 2021 here.
The Global Good Awards 2022 are now closed for entries.
You can see the full listing of all our 2021 winners here.
