End of Year Successes in 2019

You took to the streets for climate strikes and marches across the country, ensuring the UK is leading the way in tackling the climate crisis.  

In 2019, Scotland committed to a net-zero emissions target by 2045, and the wider UK committed to the same target by 2050.  

With your support, we’re continually pushing for more. 

Seagrass is the grass of the sea. Found along shallow coastlines, it absorbs carbon up to 35 times faster than tropical rainforests and is vital for marine life, which depends on the meadows for food and shelter.   

With your support, we worked with partners to collect 1 million seagrass seeds, which we’ll plant next year to establish a pilot site in Wales. If successful, this could be scaled up around the UK to help support marine life and tackle the climate crisis.

This year, with partners, we deployed underwater robot cameras to observe the behaviour of basking sharks for the first-time in UK, in Scotland’s Inner Hebrides. 

Footage gathered through the project will help us to show how critical the location is for the sharks, which will help to support the case for creating a brand new Marine Protected Area (MPA). MPAs are designated areas which protect the habitat and species found inside of them.  

You helped secure Inuit-led protection for a significant portion of the Last Ice Area in the Canadian Arctic, a polar region where scientists project sea ice will persist the longest in the face of a warming world.  

Tuvaijuittuq, meaning “the ice never melts” in Inuktitut, is now an interim Marine Protected Area. Almost the size of Germany, it will provide a future climate refuge for sea ice-dependent species like narwhal, polar bear and walrus as well as the under-ice algae that fuels the entire Arctic food web.   

This year, thanks to your support, 322,000 sq. km - one of the world’s largest conservation areas – was protected here in an agreement that also supports Inuit food security, infrastructure and employment. 

Since 2017, we've been monitoring jaguars in the Napo- 

Putumayo Corridor - 300,000 hectares of forest spanning Colombia, Ecuador and Peru.  

Thanks to your support, in the last two years we installed 129 camera traps here. Over 30 jaguars have already been identified, and it’s estimated at least 2,000 can be found in this area. 

You're helping to protect and restore a trillion trees worldwide. The ambition is huge, but essential to help fight the climate crisis and restore our world’s biodiversity.  

There were once six trillion trees on the planet, yet now there are only three trillion – and ten billion trees per year are still being lost.  This leads to a changing climate, shrinking habitat for wildlife, and harder lives for billions of people.  

With your support, we’re protecting and restoring a trillion trees by 2050, to reverse these trends and create a world where forests are expanding, not shrinking – with benefits for all. 

Mountain gorillas live in east-central Africa in just two isolated populations – one in the Virunga Volcanoes (a region spanning 3 national parks in Uganda, Rwanda and Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)) and one in Bwindi Impenetrable National Park, Uganda, which connects to Sarambwe Nature Reserve, DRC. 

This year, it’s been announced that the number of mountain gorillas in the Bwindi -Sarambwe  ecosystem has risen from an estimated 400 in 2011 to 459 in 2018. 

This brings the total number of wild mountain gorillas to 1,063 when combined with the results from the Virunga Volcanoes survey from 2015/16. They still remain endangered, but their population increase demonstrates just what can be achieved when governments, communities and partners commit to reversing the catastrophic loss of nature.  

Through your support, we’re working through the International Gorilla Conservation Programme (IGCP) - a coalition between WWF, Conservation International and Fauna & Flora International – to monitor and protect these amazing great apes.