Welcome to Wildlife Works’ monthly Newsletter, “Reasons for Wild Hope”. In this edition we cover a new study on the effectiveness of conservation efforts, a new Wildlife Works short film, and essential voluntary carbon market updates from May.
What is Wild Hope and why is it the name of our newsletter? Overcoming the challenges of climate change, biodiversity loss, and achieving sustainable development for all is a monumental effort. It requires a radical approach to hope: one that is sustained by the resilience of nature, inspired by symbiotic relationships found throughout the wild, and cultivated by real-world success stories of community conservation and global collaboration. Wild Hope is fierce and unyielding, like elephants steadfastly walking hundreds of miles to reach water. It’s the wildflower sprouting through the crack in the cement, or the first drop of rain after years of drought. Wild Hope is rooted in the reality of the immense scale of today’s global crises and the knowledge of readily available solutions.
So, what’s one reason for wild hope from recent headlines? A first-of-its-kind study provides comprehensive evidence that conservation actions globally are working and are effectively slowing biodiversity loss. We've never had a doubt that community-led conservation works; we've seen it first-hand with the return of forest elephants and bonobos at our Mai Ndombe REDD+ project and the rebounding wildlife populations at the Kasigau Corridor REDD+ project. However, monitoring the return of endangered species is no small task. Our latest short film, “Eyes on the Forest” shows the incredible efforts of the Mai Ndombe biodiversity team to monitor wildlife in this forest.
EYES ON THE FOREST: TRACKING THE RETURN OF ENDANGERED SPECIES
Take a moment to immerse yourself in the rainforests of the Congo Basin, and follow our biodiversity team as they journey into the forest to set up and retrieve camera traps.
VOLUNTARY CARBON MARKET UPDATES
In a historic show of support for the Voluntary Carbon Market (VCM), the Biden administration laid out a set of broad governmental guidelines around the use of carbon offsets. These guidelines reinforce the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Markets (ICVCM) and the Voluntary Carbon Markets Integrity Initiative (VCMI). We are pleased to see that the U.S. Government’s principles squarely overlap with the principles that have guided Wildlife Works' project development process from the beginning. These include centering core-benefits for local communities, ensuring equitable and transparent sharing of those benefits, enabling community-led governance over projects, and contributing to collaborative efforts to continuously enhance market integrity. Our work co-founding initiatives like the Peoples Forests Partnership, Equitable Earth, and our Developers' Best Practices Guide exemplify our commitment to these principles. This endorsement from a leading world government underscores the importance of the VCM in addressing climate change.
The demand for nature-based voluntary carbon credits is clearly rebounding and on the rise, as evidenced by tech giants Google, Salesforce, Meta, and Microsoft joining forces under the "Symbiosis Coalition" to contract up to 20 million tonnes of nature-based voluntary carbon credits. The private sector has an enormous impact on nature: the Boston Consulting Group reports that value chains in energy, food, infrastructure, and fashion drive more than 90% of human-induced pressure on biodiversity. But as Akanksha Khatri of the World Economic Forum pointed out in a recent Op-Ed, only 5% of Fortune Global 500 companies have targets for protecting nature.
In her Op-Ed, Khatri argues that pivoting away from business as usual is not merely a "good thing to have" but a critical necessity for human well-being and economic prosperity. The World Economic Forum's research indicates that investing in nature could unlock $10 trillion in business opportunities annually and create 395 million jobs by 2030. Furthermore, a new research paper (still in peer review) estimates that the macroeconomic damages from climate change are six times larger than previously thought, with a 1°C increase in global temperature leading to a staggering 12% decline in world GDP, implying a Social Cost of Carbon of $1,056 per ton of carbon dioxide. Climate change and biodiversity loss are inherently connected and must be tackled together. As a new paper published in Nature Communications revealed, declines in biodiversity could significantly reduce the ability of ecological systems to store carbon. Wildlife Works’ carbon projects are fundamentally biodiversity projects because of our founding mission to protect wildlife.
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NEWS STORIES WE’RE FOLLOWING
