2021 Annual Report — Rainforest Trust | Page 4

On Christmas Day , 2021 , Tom Lovejoy died , and a day later , Ed Wilson . What dreadful losses to Conservation and to Rainforest Trust . Yet 2021 also saw the triumph of their ideas and extraordinary growth in the impact of this charity on whose board they served .

Tom pioneered many influential ideas in conservation , from the concept of biological diversity , to the Amazon tipping point , to the insidious impacts of habitat fragmentation . But most recently he championed the interdependence of biodiversity loss and climate change . Nature is both a victim of man-made warming and a large part of the solution to it : large intact tropical forests are critical to solving both crises . This idea went mainstream in 2021 at the Glasgow Climate Conference where the nations of the world for the first time put nature front and center , pledging to end deforestation by 2030 .

Ed ’ s books revolutionized biology and conservation at least three times , with Island Biogeography in 1967 , Sociobiology in 1975 , and Half Earth in 2016 . To save the majority of the planet ’ s 10 million or more species from extinction , Ed argued , we need to protect nature across at least half the globe . That argument , as radical and preposterous as it first sounded , inspired the global “ 30x30 ” movement to protect 30 % of Earth ’ s lands and seas by 2030 . As this Annual Report goes to press , 103 countries have committed to this , including the United States .

Since our founding , Rainforest Trust ’ s premise has been that permanently protecting habitat must be the number-one conservation priority because habitat loss is the leading cause of extinction . So we have always focused on the creation and expansion of protected areas and other land designations , such as Indigenous territories , that durably preserve nature . In time , it became clear that this strategy is also one of the most costeffective ways to fight climate change .

Over the past few years , the conservation community has rediscovered the primacy of protected areas , so they were receptive when we helped launch a new Protecting Our Planet Challenge in 2021 . Rainforest Trust pledged to invest half a billion dollars in protected area creation this decade , and eight other donors joined us to bring the total to $ 5 billion . Our leadership and impact were recognized by Jeff Bezos , who gave us $ 20 million for the Andes and Congo ; by our SAVES Challenge benefactor , who extended the support and challenge ; and by many thousands of donors from schoolchildren to the chair of our board . We are deeply grateful to each , and awed by their commitment to this cause .

Your generosity enabled us to grant $ 47 million towards new projects with our partners in 2021 which , when complete , will create 13,201,189 acres of protected areas in Africa , Asia and Latin America , by far the largest commitment in our history .

4 Rainforest Trust 2021 Annual Report