Climate change is already having an impact on lives around the world, particularly on those least able to adapt. Droughts are becoming more frequent and severe, rainforest is at risk, and wildlife is threatened due to a changing climate.
As the climate and natural world become unstable, so does our way of life.
The average global temperature is 1°C warmer than it was before the industrial revolution. In the Paris Agreement in 2015, nearly 200 countries agreed to prevent that increase going above 1.5°C. We’re heading rapidly towards that limit.
Scientists repeatedly warn of the impact if average global temperatures do increase beyond that 1.5°C limit.
There is still time to take action. We need to act now to make a difference. Keeping rainforest standing is the smartest climate action there is.
Deforestation releases as much carbon into the atmosphere as the global transport sector1. It also destroys the best natural carbon capture and storage technology we have; forests.
It is also an essential one. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) regard reducing rainforest loss to be a priority if emissions are to be halved by 2030 and global heating is to be kept below 1.5℃2.
Cool Earth was created to develop the best ways of working alongside rainforest communities to address multiple drivers of deforestation.
Mitigating carbon emissions from deforestation is therefore central to our mission and by supporting Cool Earth you are supporting innovation in rainforest protection and emissions reduction.
This does not earn you a carbon credit or an offset because neither Cool Earth nor our partners participate in carbon trading. Rainforest protection is too complex and too important to fit rules designed for solar lanterns and flight offsets. We explain this in more detail below.
Building sustainable partnerships to halt destruction is nonetheless key to cutting emissions. So whether you are an individual, a business or a foundation, Cool Earth provides you with everything from satellite data to personal testimony to understand the good you’re investing in.
Supporting Cool Earth earns you a place alongside those who believe rainforest is best protected by the people who live there and best done hand in hand with clear sustainable development goals.
For those supporters who are focused on emission reductions from rainforest protection, Cool Earth has developed a dedicated fund. If you are a business, click here for more information about our Sustainable Development Goal Fund.
Preserving rainforest is the most effective climate action anyone can take. The people best placed to protect rainforest are those that depend on it.
Carbon capture is an experimental technology that aims to trap atmospheric carbon, reduce concentrations of planet heating CO2 and contribute to the fight against climate change.
This sequestration technology already exists as trees. They remove carbon from the atmosphere and store it in their trunks, roots and canopy. Tropical forests have the highest carbon density of all forest types, with an ability for vast carbon capture storage3.
Alongside carbon storage, forests also provide many ecosystem services ranging from local livelihoods to food, water, health and the maintenance of biological diversity.
But it is being lost at an alarming rate and so this carbon store is becoming a carbon source. Research shows that 8% of all global emissions are from tropical deforestation alone, but that these same forests can provide 23% of the cost-effective climate mitigation needed before 20304.
If large scale action is not taken to protect rainforest over the coming decade critical thresholds will be breached that have kept the world habitable, the Hothouse Earth effect.
If counted as a single entity, deforestation ranks as the third largest emitter of greenhouse gasses behind the US and China5. From agriculture to urban expansion, there are an increasing number of varied and complex threats that are leading to large-scale forest loss. However, half of deforestation in tropical areas is caused by informal, small-scale livelihood activities such as shifting cultivation and slash and burn6.
This is what Cool Earth is working to address. By partnering with rainforest communities, we will learn the best ways of addressing these threats and share this knowledge around the globe.
Carbon offsets are products that promise a reduction of CO2 emissions to compensate and negate an emission made elsewhere. These offsets are created by reducing the emission from a prescribed list of activities, of which the largest contributor is installing renewable sources of energy.
These offsets are predicated on four requirements being met:
Demonstrating how these requirements will be met to a third party certification body can be a costly process and a number of Cool Earth’s partnership projects are not of a sufficient scale to absorb these associated administrative and assurance costs. As a charity, these are costs that we try to avoid so that we can invest in new projects and strengthen our existing partnerships.
While Cool Earth’s primary objective is certainly to mitigate climate change through avoided deforestation, working in partnership with indigenous communities, we don’t translate this into a price per tonne of carbon.
Cool Earth’s work is also community-led and adaptive to the changing threats and drivers of deforestation and is therefore incompatible with common approaches and carbon certification requirements.
Undeniably, rainforest protection must play a critical role in the global strategy to avert climate breakdown, helping prevent the release of billions of tonnes of CO2 currently stored in tropical trees.
But we shouldn’t use rainforest protection as a get out of jail free card and look to offset our negative impact. As environmentally conscious individuals, we should go further. Protecting rainforest is the most urgent climate action we can take.
In place of trading offsets in the carbon market, Cool Earth is committed to publishing monitoring data and the results of its work, and to provide an alternative option for people who want to invest in climate change mitigation.
To protect rainforest, we put people first. Indigenous peoples and local communities are described as “effective biodiversity and conservation managers”, and the “primary custodians of most of the world’s remaining tropical forests and biodiversity hotspots.7
“Recognizing the knowledge, innovations and practices, institutions and values of indigenous peoples and local communities and their inclusion and participation in environmental governance often enhances their quality of life, as well as nature conservation, restoration and sustainable use, which is relevant to broader society.” – IPBES Report, 2019
Indigenous peoples and local communities manage at least 24 percent (54,546 MtC) of the total carbon stored above ground in the world’s tropical forests, a sum greater than 250 times the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by global air travel in 20158.
Cool Earth’s model is unique, we:
In addition to mitigating carbon emissions from deforestation, rainforest conservation has a positive impact on many different areas, from social benefits to protecting complex ecosystem services:
Cool Earth is transparent, innovative and learning. We know that charities must constantly evaluate and learn from their work programmes in order to remain accountable to their donors, but most importantly to their beneficiaries.
That’s why, in our mission to find the best ways of protecting rainforest, we are always reflecting on our programmes, and our communications with stakeholders. You may have noticed some changes in our messaging, explained here, in order to improve our clarity and effectiveness.
Cool Earth is committed to learning and innovation. This is how we will achieve the biggest possible impact in the long term. It’s why Cool Earth’s Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning team look at everything from satellite analysis to household survey data, with the aim to have an up to date view of the social and environmental realities on the ground.
The team has been developing approaches to monitor canopy cover, to estimate carbon stocks, and to set up an alert system for deforestation events. These approaches include the integration of essential community knowledge and on-the-ground data collection. In addition to this, an exciting new project hopes to start Cool Earth producing maps that forecast where deforestation may take place in the future based on past patterns of canopy loss, which if successful, could have the potential to tailor new and more effective conservation strategies.
Cool Earth is also designing a monitoring framework that will monitor rainforest even after a partnership has formally ended in recognition that it will take time to truly understand the long-term impacts of our work.
Challenges remain that we are working to understand, evaluate and address, such as how much deforestation would occur if communities were not supported by Cool Earth or how long they’ll remain intact for.
Although we’ve said it’s complex to quantify avoided deforestation emissions, we’re rising to the challenge. Understanding how rates of deforestation are changing is key, but there will still be significant work in the coming years to link these changes to the most successful strategies for rainforest protection. This is just the beginning for Cool Earth in refining its approach.
Zarin et al. 2015 – Biomass maps used to measure carbon stored in our partnerships
Global Forest Watch – Latest data and tools related to forest protection
Climate Care – a good reference point for projects selling carbon credits
Scientific American. (2019). Deforestation and Its Extreme Effect on Global Warming. [online] Available at: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/deforestation-and-global-warming/ [Accessed 28 Aug. 2019].
IPCC, 2018: Global warming of 1.5°C. An IPCC Special Report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways, in the context of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change, sustainable development, and efforts to eradicate poverty [V. Masson-Delmotte, P. Zhai, H. O. Pörtner, D. Roberts, J. Skea, P.R. Shukla, A. Pirani, W. Moufouma-Okia, C. Péan, R. Pidcock, S. Connors, J. B. R. Matthews, Y. Chen, X. Zhou, M. I. Gomis, E. Lonnoy, T. Maycock, M. Tignor, T. Waterfield (eds.)]. In Press.
Scientific American. (2019). Deforestation and Its Extreme Effect on Global Warming. [online] Available at: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/deforestation-and-global-warming/ [Accessed 28 Aug. 2019].
World Resources Institute. (2019). By the Numbers: The Value of Tropical Forests in the Climate Change Equation. [online] Available at: https://www.wri.org/blog/2018/10/numbers-value-tropical-forests-climate-change-equation [Accessed 28 Aug. 2019].
World Resources Institute. (2019). By the Numbers: The Value of Tropical Forests in the Climate Change Equation. [online] Available at: https://www.wri.org/blog/2018/10/numbers-value-tropical-forests-climate-change-equation [Accessed 28 Aug. 2019].
Duguma, L., Atela, J., Minang, P., Ayana, A., Gizachew, B., Nzyoka, J. and Bernard, F. (2019). Deforestation and Forest Degradation as an Environmental Behavior: Unpacking Realities Shaping Community Actions. Land, 8(2),
Tauli-Corpuz, V. (2019). A Letter from the UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. [online] Corneredbypas.com. Available at: https://www.corneredbypas.com/ [Accessed 28 Aug. 2019].
Rights and Resources Initiative, Woods Hole Research Center, & World Resources Institute. (2016), Toward a Global Baseline of Carbon Storage in Collective Lands: An Updated Analysis of Indigenous Peoples’ and Local Communities’ Contributions to Climate Change Mitigation.