Last week the Prince Charles’ Rainforest Project launched its SOS campaign to raise support for a global effort to protect rainforests as a way to fight climate change.
The campaign includes a series of videos featuring politicians, business leaders, celebrities, environmentalists, and concerned citizens discussing why it is important to save rainforests. Each speaker shares the screen with an animated frog which serves as a charismatic symbol to engage the public.
The Prince’s Rainforest Project, launched in 2007, is promoting awareness of the role deforestation plays in climate change—it accounts for nearly a fifth of greenhouse gas emissions. The project also publicizes the multitude of benefits tropical forests provide, including maintenance of rainfall, biodiversity, and sustainable livelihoods for millions of people. But the initiative goes beyond merely raising awareness—it is pushing a plan to provide emergency funding to save rainforests. The money would provide a financing bridge for tropical countries to begin taking steps necessary to reduce deforestation—a prelude to a broader U.N.-backed mechanism (known as REDD for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation), which would compensate developing countries for their progress in protecting their forests.
“Rainforests are utterly essential in our fight against climate change,” said HRH The Prince of Wales in a statement. “They absorb nearly a fifth of all our carbon emissions and yet they are being destroyed at the rate of a football pitch every four seconds. To solve the problem, we have to find ways to ensure the trees become more valuable alive than dead so there is no incentive to cut them down.”
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