Global Canopy

A couple of months ago, we donated to Surfers Against Sewage to contribute to protecting Britain's oceans. This month, we're donating to Global Canopy to help protect our forests.

Global Canopy is a data-driven not for profit that targets the market forces destroying nature. They do this by improving transparency and accountability for corporate, financial, and governmental bodies.

An example of this is ForestIQ, a tool they've built that curates the best available datasets on how companies are addressing their links to deforestation. Similarly, they created both the widely referenced Forest500, which has been running for a decade ranking the most influential companies driving tropical deforestation, and the Trase platform, which provides data to governments and major companies on deforestation linked to the agricultural commodity trade.

By organising and publicising data in this way, they go a long way to increasing the accountability of companies and governmental bodies. The hope is that with this enhanced accountability, there will also be regulatory changes, and as you might expect, I'm going to list some of the changes that they've helped push along.

The luxury fashion group Kering (parent company of brands like Gucci and Saint Laurent) used data from Forest500 to eliminate any leather sourcing in their supply chain that had links to deforestation. Schroders, a major asset management company, committed to creating deforestation-free portfolios by 2025 which would be regulated by Forest500. Perhaps more importantly, EU regulations on deforestation were directly informed by the Trase platform, which gave them evidence to back up new regulations. 

It's important for someone to challenge governmental and corporate practise on environmental matters like this, and Global Canopy do a fantastic job of holding them to account.

We gave £350 to Global Canopy on the 5th October 2024.