8th August 2022
This year the UK has reached a milestone in climate history as we’ve seen temperatures hit 40 degrees for the first time ever. These record-breaking temperatures are another reminder of the importance of those working tirelessly around the world to combat climate change. Several of Prism the Gift Fund’s (Prism’s) Collective Funds are doing precisely that.
Whether they are working to empower Indigenous leaders, facilitating carbon sequestration through reforestation, or building awareness and fighting for climate justice, Prism’s Collective Funds are playing a pivotal role in the transition toward a sustainable future. We’re highlighting the work of a few of these groups who are, in many different and creative ways, helping to realise a greener future:
Climate Force UK
One of Prism’s newest Collective Fund’s, ClimateForce UK, exists to regenerate and reforest agricultural land in a lowland rainforest ecosystem. ClimateForce UK will support a pilot project of ClimateForce Ltd in Australia – Tropical Regen – which involves collecting and cultivating native trees, planting them, and maintaining them as they grow. Reforestation is a popular form of sequestration, the process of capturing and storing atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) and an effective strategy for reducing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. With a mission to plant 360,000 trees over 526 acres in the world’s oldest rainforest Daintree, in Far North Queensland, ClimateForce is taking a pivotal step towards protecting endemic biodiversity, reducing our carbon footprint, and ensuring a more sustainable future.
Beyond their work on the ground, ClimateForce UK effectively raises awareness through educational workshops, corporate keynote speeches, festival storytelling, and live-streamed panels. By helping local governments, NGOs, businesses and communities to design carbon-reduction strategies, or even working with schools to facilitate early careers into sustainability, ClimateForce is at the forefront of connecting all relevant stakeholders with impact partners at the frontiers of climate change solutions.
MAKE MY MONEY MATTER
Through green finance advocacy, Prism’s Collective Fund Make My Money Matter (MMMM) aims to raise awareness by promoting sustainable pensions. Through a people-powered campaign, MMMM is fighting to build a sustainable future by educating the public on how pensions are used. In partnership with SYSTEMIQ and Global Canopy, MMMM published a report that presented the full scale of ties between pensions and global deforestation. For an average pension holder, £2 out of every £10 supports environmentally destructive businesses, supply chains, and industries that accelerate climate change – in the UK, £300 billion can be linked to deforestation.
In response to this, MMMM has built a movement which calls on all pension holders to question their own pension funds. They have developed and offer email templates available to the public to challenge their pension providers. MMMM is also engaging and educating trustees and providers to explore schemes that align with net zero goals, connecting the public with other grassroots activist organisations, and encouraging more people to sign a petition which urges UK pension funds to cut environmentally harmful investments and commit to a net zero future.
DEGREES
Prism’s Collective Fund, Degrees, is supporting The Degrees Initiative (TDI) charity, which is playing a central role in geoengineering research to transform Solar Radiation Management (SRM). Broadly, SRM is a theoretical approach toward reducing the impacts of climate change through the reflection of sunlight back out into space – SRM remains the only known way to quickly stop, or reverse, the rise in global temperatures. To date, TDI has partnered with a wide range of environment and development NGO and civil society organisations across the world to expand the discussion of SRM’s potential risks, benefits, science and governance.
By building the capacity of climate-vulnerable countries to evaluate SRM, Collective Fund Degrees is enabling TDI to shape the global conversation around this technology. TDI’s DECIMAL’s fund, the first SRM modelling research collaborator programme launched in 2018, empowers scientists from the Global South through community-building activities that promote South-South and South-North collaboration around SRM. This research and initiative on SRM has been commended by the US National Academy of Sciences, endorsed by the editors of scientific journal Nature, and featured across the world’s largest news outlets.
CHOOSE EARTH
Powered by Prism’s Collective Fund ‘Choose Love’ in partnership with impact-led creative studio ‘Earthrise’, Choose Earth directly supports Indigenous communities in their continual fight for human rights and environmental and social justice. Choose Earth is providing crucial resources to indigenous leaders to encourage the implementation of effective strategies of resistance and change. Choose Earth aims to reframe Western narratives on Indigenous traditions and climate conservation. This is achieved through a Choose Earth platform whereby Indigenous leaders can relay vital information grounded in their emotional and spiritual intelligence.
Indigenous communities represent 5% of the world’s population, 5,000 different cultures and speak the majority of the world’s 7,000 languages, and protect around 80% of global biodiversity. Nevertheless these communities face more threats than ever before, due to continually expansive extractive industries and their activities happening on Indigenous land. Choose Earth has therefore sought to use innovative storytelling and an exchange of knowledge to amplify Indigenous voices, as a way to foster greater understanding on global environmental solutions.
Most importantly, Choose Earth is spearheaded by nine nationally recognised Brazilian leaders, all of whom are community leaders, activists, and founders of organisations and collective movements, for example, National Association of Indigenous Women Warriors of Acenstrality (ANMIGA), and the Articulation of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil (APIB).
