This year’s World Rainforest Day focuses on the work needed to restore and regenerate these critical areas of biodiversity.
There’s little doubt that rainforests play a crucial role in controlling the planet’s climate and sustaining life on Earth. While the Amazon Rainforest may be the largest and most famous, there are vast areas of rainforest around the world, each one providing an incredible range of biodiversity, habitats, sustenance and livelihoods for millions of people, as well as a natural ability to sequester carbon from the atmosphere and combat climate change.
To focus everyone’s attention on the world’s rainforests, the Rainforest Partnership launched World Rainforest Day in 2017, which happens every year on June 22. The event celebrates the importance of healthy rainforests for biodiversity, culture, climate and livelihoods, convening a global movement to protect and restore them.
Conserve, restore, regenerate
With the theme of ‘Conserve, restore, regenerate’, this year’s World Rainforest Day concentrates on the work that needs to be done to ensure rainforests thrive for centuries to come.
“To ensure a healthy and thriving planet, we need to assist the recovery of ecosystems that have been degraded or destroyed while conserving those that are still intact,” the Rainforest Partnership says. “Restoration and regeneration can happen in many ways, from actively planting trees or removing pressures so that nature can recover on its own, to creating new economic and agricultural systems that have nature at their core.”
Accompanying the event, the World Rainforest Day Summit takes place online the day before (June 21). Free to attend, the event features a series of presentations and roundtable discussions with titles such as ‘Restoration & Rewilding’, ‘Planetary Healers: Caring for the Rainforest’ and ‘What Matters Most in Rainforest Education?’.
For more information and details of how to book your place, click here.
Do your bit
As an organisation dedicated to helping companies offset their carbon emissions from their marketing communications, Carbon Balanced Paper funds a number of projects through World Land Trust (WLT), an environmental charity that protects the world’s most biologically significant habitats by funding the creation of reserves.
Those projects include purchasing 1,235 acres of land in Nangaritza Valley, in the south-east of Ecuador to protect the animals and plant life from agricultural expansion and gold mining, as well as the forests of Sierra de Xilitla, high in the mountains of the Sierra Madre Oriental in Mexico.
Since WLT began in 1989, the charity has directly funded 2.4 million acres of land, which has allowed its partners around the world to leverage further funding to preserve over 5.5 million acres. In total, the organisation has 34 partners, which has resulted in the preservation of over 25 million acres – an area the size of Iceland.
By working with Carbon Balanced Paper, you are not only helping to balance your own carbon emissions, but helping to protect some of the world’s most threatened species and habitats – including the rainforests.
