Wednesday 6 April 2011

Rainforest Rescue

WWF and Sky are working together to help save one billion trees in the Amazon rainforest and protect around three million hectares from deforestation. That’s an area of rainforest roughly the size of Belgium. Sky Rainforest Rescue will work with local communities and the government in the Brazilian state of Acre to help make the forest worth more standing than dead. The project will:



* support local people to preserve their forests and adopt sustainable practices on their land. * help local people find new market opportunities for sustainable rainforest products like rubber, and get fair prices for their goods. * support the Acre state government to monitor deforestation. * engage with governments and international bodies to address the causes of deforestation in the Amazon



It's a project that promises to make a big impact on the rainforests in Acre, an area in the north-west of Brazil that covers an area equivalent in size to England and Wales.



It is easy to be cynical about multinational companies such as Sky getting involved in conservation projects, but the money needs to come from somewhere if we are to save the Amazon and Sky do make significant commitments to environmental sustainability, which you can read about here.



You can find out more about the project and how you can get involved here.




(WWF phoned me recently and asked me to commit to a sizeable donation to this project. However I'm not in the position to make new charitable donations at the moment so this blog post is in lieu of a donation).



As ever, red text in this post contains hyperlinks to other webpages where you can find out more.

3 comments:

martine said...

You are right, i did feel a bit cynical when I saw the Sky advert about this project, and you are also right that we should be pleased and encourage big companies to get involved in this kind of fund raising.
thanks for the post
martine

Anonymous said...

Now that is something very worthwhile!

RG said...

Slowly but surely! Progress - but look closely behind every gilded announcement! If it doesn't benefit their shareholders/owners then it is mighty suspicious.