"My spirit is always warning me that when the forest is all destroyed there will be strong winds, the sun will get very hot. It will be difficult  to breathe, then everybody will die. Not just Indians. I am warning you to think, you have to change your ideas. Leave the jungle alone." ~ Chief Raoni (1989)


Public opinion has become painfully aware of the catastrophic effects of climate change. In the past few years we have witnessed increased frequency and severity of hurricanes, storms, floods, droughts, water shortages, melting of the polar ice caps, rising of the oceans and the burning of tropical rainforests. Continued

---

Save The Date !

Rainforest Fund's 21st Birthday Celebration Benefit Concert
Produced by Trudie Styler
Featuring: Sting, Elton John, Lady Gaga and.....
May 13, 2010  
Learn more

---

News

November 22, 2009
Sting urges Brazil to listen to tribal dam fears
He was speaking at a press conference in Sao Paulo where he was reunited with indigenous leader Raoni Metyktire who joined him in a similar campaign 20 years ago which attracted worldwide attention.

Indigenous tribes in the Amazon say the Belo Monte project, which would be the third largest hydro-electric dam in the world, poses a threat to their way of life.

Sting said Brazil was in the front line of the fight against climate change and it was even more important now to listen to the voices of those who live there than it had been 20 years ago. Continued

---

Brazil

The Rainforest Foundation as a whole has been in action, helping indigenous people to conserve their environment and defend their rights since 1989.

At that time the goal was to help Chief Raoni , the Kayapo leader and its tribes to protect and obtain legal recognition of their land., in the XINGU area of the Brazilian Amazon.



"It was our first and major initiative. We worked hard , campaigned globally to reach that goal."



This resulted in 1993 in the legal recognition by the Brazilian Government of the Mekragnoti Indigenous Area , Ancestral land of the Kayapo.



The legal recognition was followed by the demarcation of those more than 17.000 square miles of land undertaken by the Rainforest Foundation with the Kayapo themselves, and by a serie of projects aimed at helping the indigenous communities to create an environment suitable to their ways of living, and their protection against outside invaders.

Twenty years later our pioneer work is still appreciated

Do Trees Grow on Money?

Rainforests are back on the global agenda in a big way. Governments now recognise the importance of protecting tropical forests in order to avoid dangerous climate change, and there is now much debate. As governments try to thrash out the details of a new international agreement, expected to be signed at the end of 2009, they are discussing how best to include measures to save rainforests, and thereby address one of the major causes of climate change. Worldwide, forest destruction generates more greenhouse gas emissions each year than do all the trains, planes and cars on the planet. So if we are to tackle global warming, there is an urgent need to find ways to reduce the 20% of global greenhouse gas emissions caused by forest destruction each year, and to keep the remaining forests standing.

Continued

---