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General Updates from the World Land Trust

General updates and new additions to the website of World Land Trust, an international conservation organisation working to preserve the world's most biologically important and threatened lands.

This page shows the most recent updates.

Tuesday, January 26, 2010:

Vacancy: Assistant to Acting Donations Manager (maternity cover) 

The World Land Trust currently have a vacancy for a Assistant to Acting Donations Manager (maternity cover) to work full time at the World Land Trust office in Halesworth, Suffolk. The successful applicant will be numerate and literate, have good computer skills and experience in database programmes and management. A good telephone manner and inter-personal skills are essential and an interest in wildlife and conservation is an advantage.

The closing date for applications is 21 February 2010 and interviews will be held the following week.

More information and how to apply for this post »

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Wednesday, December 23, 2009:

After Copenhagen 

Position statement from World Land Trust

World Land Trust has been engaged in addressing climate change through mitigation and adaptation for over 20 years when the issue first reared its head and as the challenges became evident. This was well before the Kyoto Protocol.

As an organisation dedicated to the conservation of threatened habitats and their species, climate change was an issue we simply could not ignore. WLT has always emphasised the value of voluntary actions by individuals and forward-thinking business acting at whatever level they could, to support practical actions in the field, pioneering techniques and testing approaches to prepare the ground for the political process that must eventually follow. A central issue for WLT was avoiding the destruction of standing natural forest through land purchase and protection.

Track record for Saving Threatened Tropical Forests and addressing Climate Change

WLT, with support from companies and the general public, and working through its overseas project partner organisations, has been instrumental in protecting and restoring hundreds of thousands of hectares of threatened tropical forest across the world, all supporting a wealth of endangered species. These forests can be linked closely to carbon sequestration - particularly in countries such as Belize, Mexico, and Paraguay where the threats are acute. The importance of tropical forest protection is important because of its role in carrying carbon sequestration and adaptation to climate change as key co-benefits alongside conservation of critically important natural habitat. Forest restoration, in previously cleared areas, is also crucial in order to buffer the interior and maintain connectivity of forests.

There is no question that the Copenhagen outcome was disappointing. Despite clear knowledge of the moral and practical issues at stake, the political vision and will to take action remains bogged down by narrower interests. But the meeting in Copenhagen did serve a purpose, if only to demonstrate the reasons for its failure. The problems have, and will not, go away. The next big opportunity is in Mexico in 2010, and there is no doubt this will continue to be a matter for intense discussion in the coming decade. The job we face now is to maintain the pressure.

WLT's Role

WLT's key aim is to save threatened habitats, with particular emphasis on tropical forests. And this is, in fact, one of the areas where significant progress has been made. The voluntary sector, including socially responsible corporate policy, is, as ever, ahead of the game and this is no time to lose momentum. Our aim is to push forward yet more vigorously with what we do, in partnership with the like-minded, until governments finally reach the consensus to meet the challenges that is required of them.

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Thursday, December 17, 2009:

How to save rainforest this Christmas 

Be eco-friendly this Christmas and consider sending greetings and gifts that have the environment in mind. Here are our suggestions for a lush, green Christmas - perfect for nature lovers or anyone who appreciates unusual gifts.

1. Top of the Tree: a WLT gift donation

Make a donation of £25 or more to the World Land Trust and dedicate it as a gift. Your gift recipient will receive a beautiful WLT Gift Pack with a Certificate together with information on how 'their' piece of land and how it will be protected. Your donation will be used to secure real land which will be included in a nature reserve, for the benefit of wildlife. The best gift you can give to friends and the earth.

Give the Gift of Rainforest »

2. Treat friends to a day off Christmas shopping

Put acres of Rainforest on your own Christmas wish list. Your friends and family will be delighted that you have saved them a shopping trip!

How to set up your own green Christmas wish list:

1. Set your goal for the total number of rainforest acres you would like to save this Christmas and ask everyone to contribute to this to help you reach your target.
2. Set up a seasonal fundraising page on JustGiving.com. Friends can make their donation here and leave a Christmas message for you as well. Setting up the page is quick, taking about 5 minutes, and you can customise it as you wish. What's more you don't have to worry about collecting the donations yourself as JustGiving takes care of all that.

3. Send e-greetings or WLT's exclusive Christmas cards

Send Christmas and seasonal cards and e-greetings and support the World Land Trust at the same time.

Browse our card options here »

4. Looking for other gifts that save the rainforest?

We can offer you conservation-friendly cuddly toys, organic chocolate and wildlife books all of which raise funds for World Land Trust's projects. Check out Beyond Acres: Gifts that help save rainforest for a selection of products that really help our work as well as making great gifts.

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Send Christmas greetings and support the World Land Trust 

In our time-poor society, a few words from someone we know can mean more than unwrapping a token gift. So, care for the environment and give a little thought rather than a lot of effort. You will see how much it is appreciated.

E-greetings

Animated ecards for all occasions with AlphaCards

Traditional ecards that are animated and with lovely soundtracks. Enjoy unlimited access to the full range all year long for just £7.50.

How you are helping WLT's conservation work:
The World Land Trust is one of the charities supported by AlphaCards.

Send ecards with AlphaCards »

Send a greeting to all your friends for a small donation

Christmas ecard Offer from Everyclick: Send an e-greeting to up to 100 recipients with a £5 donation to WLT. Additional recipients can be added and you can even upload your address book to make it really easy.

How you are helping WLT's conservation work:
Specify that the donation should benefit the World Land Trust when you send the e-greeting.

Send e-greetings with Everyclick »

Send a Card, Save a Tree

Send a free Augmented Reality interactive E-card from Stella Artois and they will save one tree in the Atlantic Rainforest of Misiones, Argentina through the World Land Trust.

How you are helping WLT's conservation work:
Each card you send saves one tree in the Atlantic Forest in Argentina.

Send an Augmented Reality card »
(You must be over the legal drinking age to visit the Stella Artois website.)

Free Wildlife eCards from the World Land Trust

For an easy way of sending an e-greeting, our Wildlife eCards are free to send to one person at the time. (To send cards to several recipients, use the Everyclick service above.)

How you are helping WLT's conservation work:
Each card carries a message about WLT's work, helping raise awareness of what we do.

Send WLT Wildlife eCards »

For people who prefer pen and ink

Exclusive Christmas cards from the World Land Trust

Our Christmas Cards come in packs of five, with special offers when you buy two packs or more. It may be too late to post them in time for Christmas, but a hand-delivered card is always appreciated!

How you are helping WLT's conservation work:
WLT's Christmas cards are produced by the Trust and buying them directly supports our work.

Order WLT Christmas cards »

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Friday, November 13, 2009:

New issue of WLT News (Autumn 2009) available to download as PDF 

Updates to the WLT website:

The Autumn issue of WLT News, the Trust's twice-yearly printed newsletter sent to supporters, is now available to download as in PDF.

Contents include:

• WLT Urgent Appeal has wide reaching effects: hope for Orang-utans
• Pantanal Wetlands, Dry Chaco and Atlantic Rainforest: Good and Not-so-Good News from Paraguay
• Atlantic Rainforest experience: Important new land purchase and wildlife galore

Download the Autumn issue of WLT News

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Tuesday, November 03, 2009:

Intern vacancy: Project Development Assistant 

The World Land Trust has a vacancy for Project Development Assistant to undertake a six-month internship at the Trust's office in Suffolk. See the internship page for more details.

The closing date for applications is 30th November, with interviews being held during the second week of December.

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Tuesday, October 27, 2009:

World Land Trust's Harriet Jones is published in Oryx 

Harriet Jones of the School of Biological Sciences, University of East Anglia (who is also the Course Director for the Graduate Diploma and external mentor for WLT interns), published a report in the journal Oryx on 'Advancing the case for microbial conservation'.

Co-written with Charles Cockell of the Open University, the report details why microorganisms should be protected and discusses the problems related to their conservation. This ground-breaking paper also proposes microbial communities that are of conservation priority.

Microorganisms include fungi, bacteria, viruses and protists (singled celled organisms) and are not often considered when thinking about species conservation. In fact many microbes have negative connotations, such as the viruses and bacteria that cause disease. However, microbes form the majority of all the biomass of life on earth, and they are essential to the world's biochemical cycles such as the nitrogen, sulphur and carbon cycles. They also have important roles in the food and pharmaceutical industries.

Harriet and Charles conclude that microorganisms are as important to conserve as plants or animals. Microorganisms highlighted for conservation priority were those which are involved in global scale biogeochemical cycles. For example some marine microbes which remove 40% of the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere are vital in climate regulation. Microbes in local cycles such as those in coral reefs, which may be affected by environmental changes were categorised as a conservation priority and microbes involved in medicine and industry were also listed for conservation.

The paper proposes that microbes should be incorporated into conservation efforts, that there should be more education on the importance of microbe conservation and that conservation groups should have a greater role in microbial conservation.

More information

Read the abstract of the paper on the Cambridge journals website and learn more about Harriet Jones on our staff pages.

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Tuesday, October 13, 2009:

New Christmas Card available to order 

A new World Land Trust exclusive Christmas card is now available to order. This year's card features a Poison dart frog by artist Oenone Hammersley.

We will have the new Christmas card in stock in about 10 days but you can pre-order now, either online through the WLT shop (opens in new window) or by calling the WLT office on +44 (0)1986 874422.

Details:
Pack of 5 cards with envelopes
Size: Folded size 17.8 cm x 12.7 cm (7 in x 5 in)
Message: Season's Greetings, blank or overprinted
Price: £3 a pack + postage & packaging
Special Offer: £2.75 per pack for orders of 2 packs or more + P&P

Other Christmas cards from the World Land Trust

We also have a limited supply of Christmas card designs from previous years at new lower prices. Special offer prices apply if you order two packs or more of any card.

See full Christmas cards details here

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Tuesday, September 01, 2009:

Where are they now? WLT's former Conservation Diploma students after graduation 

As WLT enter the third year of running a Graduate Diploma in Conservation and Project Administration, a collaboration with the University of East Anglia, we ask: What are the previous students up to?

Top: Tracie Long (second from left), Diploma student in 2007-2008, during her visit to the Paraguayan Pantanal as part of the course. Above: Fiona Duncan and Jo Keene, Diploma graduates in 2009.

The 2007-2008 Graduate Diploma Students are all hurtling along their career paths. Martyn Griffiths is General Manager for Frontiers, a charity that specialises in 'adventures in learning' for young people. Natalie Evans is Assistant Procurement Officer for Gloucestershire County Council and Tracie Long is about to start a PGCE in Secondary School Science. "The practical element of the Diploma course taught me so much. I do not feel I would be where I am today without it", says Martyn.

This year's students, who graduated in June, are already finding their feet. Jo Keene is volunteering in the Peak District, Fiona Duncan is an Assistant Project Officer for BTCV in Norfolk, and Pedro Mayorga-Jeffs is leading tours in Peru.

We are extremely proud of all our Graduate Diploma Students and will shortly be adding a 'Where are they now' page to our website in order to keep up with their career developments.

Learn more about the Graduate Diploma course

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Tuesday, July 21, 2009:

Annual Review and Abbreviated Accounts 2008 now available to download 

Updates to the WLT website:
The Annual Review and Abbreviated Accounts for 2008 is now available on this website in pdf format. To download a copy, see our financial page, which also has links to account summaries for 2008 and previous years.

To obtain a hard copy of the Annual Review and Accounts, contact the WLT office.

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Friday, July 17, 2009:

WLT's projects are changing: Introducing the Buy an Acre Fund 

WLT news:

WLT's 'Buy an Acre' projects have made it easy for individuals to take positive action for wildlife for 20 years. The Buy an Acre concept relies on land prices being relatively low -- and stable -- and this has so far been the case in our project areas in South America, where our project partners are still able to buy land quite cheaply. For this reason a donation of £50 will save One Acre, on average, in Argentina, Ecuador, Paraguay and Brazil. We have introduced the Buy an Acre Fund for donations to all of the projects where £50 saves an acre. So if you are finding it difficult to choose a project to support, a donation to the Buy an Acre Fund will make sure your money goes to the Buy an Acre project where it is most urgently needed.

In other parts of the world land is very much more expensive and land prices vary enormously. In our project areas in Malaysian Borneo, India and Kenya we don't always know in advance how many acres your donation will be able to buy. What we can guarantee, is that your donation will be used for land purchase and protection and nothing else. You can support our Urgent Appeals through JustGiving.com (more details about the current appeals will be added to the website shortly).

If you are happy for the World Land Trust to choose where your donation is most urgently needed, among all the Trust's priority land purchase and protection projects, you can donate to the WLT Action Fund. Please note that for gift donations to the WLT Action Fund we will still be able to produce certificates but we won't be able to state how many acres have been saved.

It's worth pointing out that your donation to the World Land Trust is saving real acres in real places, permanently -- it is not a limited sponsorship, or 'adoption' of a piece of land sold over and over again.

When you support a project where we are no longer funding land purchases (these are projects labelled "successfully completed") your donation will fund ongoing conservation work in the reserves, such as a warden's salary.

We are currently in the process of updating all our web pages to reflect the introduction of the Buy an Acre Fund and the urgent appeals. In the meantime you may find some conflicting information on the site, so if you are in any doubt as to what your donation options are, please contact the WLT office and our donations team will be able to clarify the situation.

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Wednesday, July 15, 2009:

Obituary: Robert (Bob) Scott 1938-2009 

The death of Bob Scott in April was a great loss to the conservation world, and a personal loss of a great friend.

I first met Bob as a fourteen year-old birdwatcher on Beddington Sewage Farm in South London. The Sewage Farm was a breeding ground for conservationists and biologists of the future, and I am still in touch with at least 8 of them. Bob worked at the Natural History Museum, but was soon to leave and become Warden of Dungeness Bird Observatory and the RSPB's Dungeness Reserve. From then on there was no stopping Bob's enthusiasm, and he rose to be Head of Reserves for the RSPB. And from its earliest days Bob was a supporter of the World Land Trust, promoting it whenever he could.

Detailed obituaries appeared in The Times and many other places, but I will always remember Bob for his (merciless) sense of humour, combined with unbounded enthusiasm for birds, wildlife and their conservation. For the sake of posterity, I would mention that although The Times obit stated that he developed an interest in moths late in life, I recall going 'mothing' with Bob and others back in the days when he was warden of Dungeness, which was over 40 years ago. Like Bob, I used to cycle there from London as a teenager for weekends (80 miles each way I think), and vividly recall Bob's beer-drinking pet crow that used to accompany him when he worked in the local pub in the evenings (Observatory Warden's pay was notoriously low in those days). More recently, every year I would catch up with him at the BirdFair, and a couple of years ago, quite by chance while staying at the Iguazu Falls hotel in Argentina, I was astounded to hear a strident shout across the hall, as Bob spotted me. He had retired from the RSPB, but was on holiday with his wife Ann and some friends, enthusing even more people as he went along. And one thing Bob probably did better than anyone else I have known (other than enthuse) was to cut through bureaucracy, and get things done.

As a memorial to Bob many of his friends and family have donated to the World Land Trust, and the funds are to be used towards our new land land purchase in Misiones, Argentina, close to the Iguazu Falls. You can donate to the Bob Scott Memorial Forest here.

By John Burton, CEO of the World Land Trust

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Monday, June 22, 2009:

Fundraising pages on JustGiving.com slow to load 

JustGiving.com, where we host fundraising pages for the WLT's urgent appeals underwent a complete overhaul on Saturday to update the look and functionality of the site. Unfortunately there seems to be some issues that have yet to be resolved and we have found that our fundraising pages are extremely slow to load. The JustGiving team are working on fixing the remaining problems and we're hopeful that the pages will be easier to access shortly.

We are fundraising for the following appeals on Justgiving:

• Elephant Corridor Appeal
• Kenyan Grasslands Appeal
• Orang-utan Appeal

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Friday, June 19, 2009:

Land purchase as a conservation tool: WLT's policy 

Latest additions to the World Land Trust website:

The World Land Trust (WLT) was one of the first organisations in the world focusing specifically on the conservation of threatened habitats through land purchase. While the WLT is not claiming that land purchase is a permanent solution to saving the world's rainforests, it is nevertheless a method of creating, relatively rapidly, protected reserves in areas under imminent threat of destruction. In our policy section of the website you can learn more about the Trust's approach to land purchase as a conservation tool, including the involvement of local communities and the rights of indigenous people.

Read WLT's policy on land purchase: Land Purchase as a Tool for Conservation

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Monday, June 08, 2009:

Vacancy for Conservation and Communications Manager 

The World Land Trust currently have a vacancy for a Conservation and Communications Manager to manage the day-to-day communication with our major donors. The position will require you to spend approximately three days a week in Suffolk and two days a week in London. This is an extremely varied post. Three days a week it will be office based – helping to plan and implement our strategy. The rest of the week will involve meetings with private individuals and corporate supporters to discuss their needs or some other aspect of our work.

The closing date for applications will be 3rd July 2009. Those selected for interview will be notified by 10th July 2009 (by email), with interviews to be held mid July.

More information about the Conservation and Communications Manager vacancy and how to apply for this post

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