Protect Our World
As we head into COP26 in Glasgow, growing worldwide consensus affirms
Protect Our World
As we head into COP26 in Glasgow, growing worldwide consensus affirms the urgent need for transformational change.
Much of humanity’s relationship with a living Earth is broken.
We need bold action to protect and restore our connections with the diversity
and abundance of life and take responsibility for our role
in influencing climate and other Earth systems that sustain us.
The Protecting Our Planet Challenge is a $5 billion private funding commitment to support
the protection of at least 30% of the planet by 2030.
This largest-ever commitment of its kind is aimed at tackling Earth’s convergent climate, biodiversity, and human health crises.
Over the next decade the nine founding organizations of this commitment will support efforts to reach
the 30% protection goal through strengthening and expanding protected areas and also by enhancing
support for Indigenous guardianship of traditional territory.
Prioritizing investment in the customary tenure of Indigenous peoples and their guardianship of territory is a bold shift,
yet represents one of the most important, and most overlooked strategies for addressing
the existential threats of climate change and biodiversity loss.
We will work together to support projects advancing enduring protection of 30 percent of the planet
in the most important places for biodiversity and climate by 2030, building collective efforts behind a more equitable,
carbon neutral and nature-positive future.
Meeting this goal will require greater ambition, innovation and collaboration among governments, companies,
and civil society to secure the mosaic of areas necessary for success.
Yet this will only be possible if we also uphold the power and advance the rights of Indigenous peoples and local communities
as guardians of the irreplaceable places upon which we all depend.
The partners of the Protecting Our Planet Challenge are therefore both encouraged by and enthusiastically support
the ground-breaking statement issued at the UNFCCC COP 26 on “Advancing Support
for Indigenous Peoples’ and Local Communities’ Tenure Rights and their Forest Guardianship”.
This public-private joint commitment is an important step toward increasing support for the self-determined priorities
of Indigenous peoples and local communities, and to securing or strengthening their customary tenure rights,
as guardians of some of the world’s most intact and thriving forests.
The $5 billion Protecting Our Planet Challenge represents the combined 10-year investment plans of
individual grantmaking organizations working independently to support protected and conserved areas across
a diversity of lands and seas in both non-ODA and ODA-eligible countries.
We anticipate that the Protecting Our Planet Challenge will invest at least $1 billion by 2030 to support Indigenous peoples
and local communities in ODA-eligible countries.
This is a conservative estimate as our overall investment in IPLC tenure and guardianship of territory globally will be considerably more.
Source: WCS Newsroom
Protect Our World
The Canopy Project
Since the beginning of the 20th century, the world’s forests have lost about 20% of their coverage,
about 7.3 million hectares (18 million acres) of forest are lost every year,
and roughly half of Earth’s tropical forests have already been cleared.
The Canopy Project works with global partners to reforest areas in dire need of rehabilitation,
including areas with some of the world’s communities most at-risk from climate change and environmental degradation,
including vital tree planting in the wake of environmental disasters.
Source: Earth day 2025
