World Land Trust (WLT) and its network of partners carries out innovative conservation work that is regularly featured in local and national media. This page displays a selection of news articles featuring WLT, ranging from our work to conserve threatened habitats and species to our high profile events.
Click on the article links to read the full stories online. Articles without links are in print only or require a subscription to be viewed online.
Wild Notebook: an amazing response from Times readers
Thank you — readers of The Times, readers of this column, I thank you as profoundly as writer ever thanked reader. It’s a great enough gift just to have my damn stuff actually read by real people out there in the real world, but I must now thank you for a still greater gift, and I’m humbled, bemused, marvelling — and quite shatteringly grateful.
Habitat loss as a result of deforestation is putting Orangutan populations under serious threat. Forests are being torn down for farming and land is being tarnished by illegal and unsustainable logging. The sporadic, random nature of the deforestation is making life difficult for these red creatures: as the forest becomes steadily more fragmented, so do the populations of orangutan, who become isolated in pockets of forest. Orangutans have been forced into small, separate groups and this is having a detrimental effect upon their genetic health and impacting negatively upon the survival rate of the species.
On Saturday morning, I read an article by Simon Barnes. Under the headline ‘Let’s buy the orang-utan a slice of Paradise’, he describes an ambitious project of the World Land Trust (WLT) to raise £1 million by 16 October. My goal is to help achieve that by my 64th birthday next Monday. My best birthday present would be to take to next month’s Heart of Borneo conference the news that the WLT’s project had succeeded in raising the funds to bridge between islands of pristine rainforest through newly purchased and protected ‘corridors’ of forest. Until 16 October, WLT benefactors have committed to match fund any donations.
“Many of our Lily and Lionel prints are inspired by the natural world, so the Look Out For Elephants collection was the perfect opportunity to take that aesthetic and use it to support the World Land Trust, which works to protect over 4m acres of land worldwide. These scarves – printed with David Bebber’s photography – will support the charity’s work with Nature Kenya to protect the Arabuko-Sokoke forest.” (Alice Stone, creative director of Lily and Lionel)
We’re all rainforest creatures these days. Where we once had Eden we now have the great fat tropical wet tangled lofty teeming impossible forest: a place at once perfect for all time and lost for ever. I’m a rainforest half-saved person myself, if only because the other option is too awful - for us, for our great grandchildren - to contemplate.
2 October 2013: Curiously, the dormouse and the tiger have more incommon than you might think - and so do Suffolk Wildlife Trust and World Land Trust. When it isn't asleep, Alice in Wonderland's dormouse lives and travels through hedgerows and trees, relying for its survival on the interconnections betwen wooded sites. Rudyard Kipling's Tiger! Tiger!, on the other hand is a Jungle book story about the relationship between humans and tigers, which also need corridors of habitat through which to roam.
In a landscape dominated by people, secure 'wildlife corridors' provide a wider area for animals to roam safely, increasing their prospects for survival. FOC was pleased to support the World Land Trust and their partner organisation, Wildlife Trust of India (WTI) in their efforts to establish such a wildlife corridor in Kerala, Southern India.
Sir David Attenborough, Bill Oddie and Chris Packham are supporting an effort to save the orangutan from extinction by raising £1m in just two weeks.
At the World Land Trust, we have been looking at our doantion patterns and there seems to be a direct correlation between the weather and online donations. When the weather is nice and sunny, donations seem to drop, but when it is wet and windy, they go up. We wondered if any larger charities have noticed similar trends and, if so, are they statistically significant? If this proves the case, we will probably be organising rain dances in June.
John Burton, Chief executive, World Land Trust, Halesworth, Suffolk
Something of great international importance is going on in a modest but historic fifteenth century house in Bridge Street, Halesworth, for this is the headquarters of World Land Trust.
Sarah Class is a rising star, a young English singer and songwriter. She is also one of Britain’s most sought after film score composers with a strong association with wildlife and natural history. A Musical Safari with Sarah Class will be a mesmerising mix of personal experiences, film sequences and live performance."What wonderful music" Sir David Attenborough on hearing the soundtrack to Africa. Friday, 25 October 2013 - 3:30pm, The Cut, Halesworth.
Chris Packham - patron of World Land Trust (WLT), TV presenter, zoologist and conservationist – will lead a WLT debate about aspects of conservation that are often swept under the carpet as being too controversial to address. The event is supported by the Sibthorp Trust, which promotes the study and discussion of key environmental issues. October 14, 2013 @ 6:30 pm - 9:30 pm, Wellcome Trust Lecture Hall, The Royal Society.
Tickets are now on sale for what promises to be a lively debate on many of the issues that are shied away from. “WLT is not a campaigning organisation but nor should we sweep major issues under the carpet,” explains John Burton, WLT Chief Executive. Monday 14th October 2013, 18:30 - 21:30, Royal Society, 6-9 Carlton House Terrace, London SW1Y 5AG.
... On August 7 morning, the trap cameras recorded footage of the body of the Caucasian leopard. After having examined the video, the experts of FPWC concluded that the leopard is limping caused maybe because it once was caught in a trap. This theory has later been confirmed by the senior scientific researcher of the Institute of Ecology and Evolution at the Russian Academy of Sciences, well-known scientist, PhD Victor Lukarevsky. In spite of the limping the animal – which is identified as male – seems to be in good shape, very strong and healthy.
On the edge of the great Pantanal wetlands in South America lies a sprawling and diverse nature reserve... What's more, more than 8,000 acres of it were funded by a legacy left to World Land Trust (WLT) by Suffolk businessman Sid Templer.
The article appeared in Remember a Charity: Your 16-page guide to charitable giving in the the UK and abroad, distributed with The Daily Telegraph
World Land Trust
Something of great international importance is going on in a modest but historic fifteenth century house in Bridge Street, Halesworth, for this is the headquarters of World Land Trust.
Founded in 1989, WLT was based on a simple (but at the time novel) idea that £25 would buy and protect an acre of rainforest. Since its pioneering campaign in Belize WLT has raised funds to save more than half a million acres of land in some 20 countries (real acres, in real countries), ensuring the survival of many threatened species including jaguar and Spectacled Bear, and many rare primates and birds.
Tropical forests play an essential role in life on Earth: they stabilise and purify water supplies, regulate weather systems and provide shelter for pollinating insects. And they help counteract global warming. Why is this such important work? Because we are at last coming to realise that everything in nature is interdependent-including humans. By preserving the natural environment, whether in our own back gardens or on the other side of the world, we are preserving ourselves.
WLT provides work in Halesworth for twenty-five people, a carbon-offsetting programme, and a wonderful gallery which puts on changing exhibitions of wildlife and landscape art that reflects the Trust's commitment to nature conservation and the preservation of rare and endangered species.
I looked up as the train stopped at a station and saw a tiger. Beside the tiger, the words The Times. And that was it, or all that I took in that brief glance. An enigmatic advertisement, one that appropriated to The Times the qualities of the tiger: bold, beautiful, known to all, but still not without mystery...
Well, if The Times is going to exploit the tiger then the tiger should exploit The Times, so here's the current state of play. There are probably fewer than 2,500 mature tigers left in the wild world: a decline of 50 per cent over the past three generations of tigers - that is to say, about 25 years.
Gift Guide: Each deckchair sold will enable the World Land Trust to purchase and protect hald an acre of threatened habitat forever. Available online.
Jeweller Dominic Jones has enlisted the help of friends Bonnie Wright, Phoebe Collings James and Clara Paget to model - as it were - the fruits of a collaboration between the World Land Trust and Winchester School of Art: their take on Southsea Deckchairs, inspired by the trust's international conservation work.
I was sitting in The Angel in Halesworth, Suffolk, with friends from the World Land Trust talking wildlife and conservation shop when a little sport drifted into the conversation. You know how it does. So I talked a bit about Andy Murray, and expressed my admiration for the way relentless work and first-class organisation by many people — especially Murray — brought him those three significant victories inside a year.
