Foreword from the Board chair
T
he year 2019 drove the urgency of our climate crisis to the forefront of global public awareness. Only a hermit living on the remotest mountaintop could have avoided the news that average global temperatures reached the second highest levels on record; that droughts around the world brought one-fourth of humanity dangerously close to running out of water; or that millions of schoolchildren were striking weekly for their right to a livable future. And then in late July, man-made fires engulfed massive swaths of the Amazon before our very eyes, ravaging Indigenous communities and stealing away one of the world’s most vital carbon stores.
The fires were a devastating planetary setback that could have pushed even the most optimistic among us to give up hope. Yet remarkably, the opposite happened. The fires incited an unprecedented outcry across the globe—and a massive crisis mobilization by members of our alliance far and wide. Together, we raised USD $1.2 million for frontline organizations across Brazil, Peru, and Colombia. The groups in this new Amazon alliance worked together to coordinate their emergency response and continue to share information in preparation for the next fire season. One positive outcome of the tragedy is a heightened global awareness of the importance of rainforests and biodiversity, and the ongoing threats to their very existence. Accordingly, we intensified our efforts to educate the broader public about the destructive cycle of poverty, unsustainable agriculture, human rights abuses, and deforestation—the very challenges that led to the birth of the Rainforest Alliance more than 30 years ago. Since then, as activists have built critically important action networks to mount sustained pressure campaigns, we have created an alliance of farming and forest communities, companies, and consumers to transform destructive systems from within. All along, our approach has centered rural communities in vulnerable production landscapes. After all, the health of an ecosystem and the well-being of those who live in and around it are inseparable. Our capacity to accelerate positive systemic change grew immensely in 2019, the second year after the merger between the Rainforest Alliance and UTZ. The successful inte-
Rainforest Alliance
2019 Annual Report
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