Cool Earth

What is Cool Earth?

Cool Earth is a charity that protects endangered forest. It combats global warming, protects eco systems and provides sustainable jobs for local people.

We started work with them in season 2009, by offering customers the option of contributing a fixed amount, dependent on their travel option, at the time of booking.

What do they do with donations raised?

They will use the donations to secure threatened rainforest. They will put it in a local trust and help protect the rainforest around the clock to keep the carbon where it belongs.

They employ local people to do the work, helping them to get income from the forest without cutting it down and make sure the rainforest is worth more standing.

Why are rainforests so important?

Rainforest destruction is a massive contributor to climate change. It accounts for as many CO2 emissions as the USA - a staggering six billion tonnes each year!

Rainforests are worth much more left standing, helping cool the planet, than they are cut down for timber or burnt to clear land for cattle ranching.

Rainforests are made of carbon. When the forest is destroyed, this carbon is released as CO2.

Rainforests are critical to global weather systems acting as the world's thermostat. The Amazon rainforest alone provides a fifth of the world's fresh water as well as a fifth of the world's oxygen.

They are home to two-thirds of all living animal and plant species on the planet, with hundreds of millions of species still undiscovered.

Rainforests under threat

In the next 24 hours, deforestation will release as much CO2 into the atmosphere as 8 million people flying from London to New York.

It's not difficult to understand why this happens. Soya, beef and palm oil prices are rising and landowners can make quick profits. But these are short-term gains. Rainforest soil is thin and fragile. Once cleared, its goodness is gone in five years.

Turning rainforests into timber and farmland makes no sense at all, environmentally or financially. Rainforest has an international carbon value far in excess of its farming worth, and when managed sustainably it can generate a good income for the local economy.

Rainforests are also known as the 'world's pharmacy' because of their wealth of natural medicines and destroying them can destroy the chances of new breakthroughs in treatment.

Projects

Cool Earth currently has projects in Peru, Brazil and Ecuador - with new sites in development. The project areas have been specifically chosen because they are of high strategic value for a number of reasons:

1. They are located at the frontier of destruction, where rainforest is immediately threatened by human activities like cattle ranching.

2. Either their location or their conservation acts as a protective blockade for tens of thousands of acres of forest behind them, ensuring our sponsors are protecting far more than their own acres.

3. They are mature rainforests with uniquely high levels of biodiversity reflecting thousands of years of undisturbed growth, wildlife and species.

For further information, visit www.coolearth.org