Protect endangered wilderness

Wilderness International purchases legally secure wilderness areas and protects them for all future generations. The purchases are refinanced through donations, which at the same time ensure the long-term protection of the areas and enable environmental education projects and research into CO2 storage and biodiversity. Donors receive a personalized certificate with the exact geo-coordinates of the protected forest area, so that the protection is directly traceable. We are currently active in the temperate rainforest of Western Canada and in the Amazon rainforest of Peru, where we are protecting ancient primary rainforests.

There are no further obligations for you. The donation is one-time, and enables us as a foundation to ensure the long-term protection of the area. The sponsorship is a symbolic one. The forest area remains the property of the Foundation.

We protect the areas we select exclusively through purchase with entry in the land register and in countries with a high level of legal security. All three international foundations are registered as owners in the land register. The forest areas that we have purchased as foundations can no longer be bought from us and we are no longer allowed to sell them. 

The organizational form of the foundation prevents the rights over the disposal of property from resting with a single person and ensures its permanent existence. Our statutes stipulate that the land is to be left untouched and only visited for research and documentation purposes. 

Due to their remoteness and the undeveloped area, our protected areas in Canada can only be reached at great financial, material and time expense and not without risk. In addition, the high level of legal certainty in Canada ensures that damage to land results in severe sanctions. The British Columbia Trespass Act clearly prohibits trespassing on private land. Violations are prosecuted in court, even if no damage has been done. We also visit and inspect the areas as part of regular research visits and have partnerships with local companies that support us.

The rainforests in Peru and Canada are among the last 2.8% of intact wilderness areas on our planet - and are unfortunately under acute threat(Plumptre et al., 2021). 10-15% of all annual emissions are caused by the destruction of these forests and their peatlands, more than by the aviation sector - so we need to act now!

Numerous studies prove the threat to the rainforest in Peru and Canada. In British Columbia, Canada, this is especially true: 

• It is home to the last large contiguous area of temperate rainforest in the world (DellaSala, 2010). And yet British Columbia, of all places, is one of the last jurisdictions in the world that continues to allow the large-scale deforestation of 600 to 1,800-year-old primeval forest giants (Wu, 2019).
• Between 2003 and 2010, deforestation in BC was responsible for higher annual CO2 emissions than the country of Finland as a whole (Wieting, 2015). The main causes of this are the timber industry, agriculture and infrastructure construction.
• On the online map of the Ancient Forest Alliance (2016 ) you can see an impressive visualization of how deforestation has progressed in southeastern BC up to 2016.

If we lose the last intact rainforests, this will have catastrophic consequences for our planet. The concept of planetary boundaries states that there are certain ecological limits which, if exceeded, will jeopardize the stability of the Earth's ecosystem and thus the progress of humanity. Numerous studies show that we are well on the way to exceeding at least five of the nine planetary boundaries, also known as 'tipping points' or 'tipping elements'. One of these elements is the loss of the tropical rainforest. We can already feel the consequences of climate change, but we still have the chance to avert the worst effects, as the summary of the book 'Earth for all' shows.