Case Study: Cool Earth
Action Areas - Protecting Nature + Climate Justice
About Cool Earth
Cool Earth was founded in 2007 with the aim of protecting rainforests and combating climate change through empowering indigenous communities. Cool Earth provides support directly to Indigenous peoples and local communities to protect rainforests allowing them to remain a vital carbon sink. Cool Earth recognizes that the Indigenous peoples and local communities who rely on and live alongside the rainforest have the longest and best track record of keeping it standing.
Cool Earth delivers 4 key solutions to deforestation:
Cash Giving - direct payments to people living in the rainforest so they can purchase what they see as most essential for their community. The payments are sent frequently, and there’s no catch or requirements on how the cash is spent.
Climate Adaptation - projects to ease the climate pressures that people in rainforest face daily, such as wildfire prevention and solar farms.
People Powered Projects - projects enabling social and economic growth such as sustainable income generation, food security and education.
Forest Monitoring - combining traditional knowledge with technology and data to make data accessible to rainforest communities.
In 2023/24 Cool Earth supported the protection of 457,000 hectares of rainforest (640,056 football pitches) by over 59,000 local people; facilitated 19 agreements to protect land, representing 60 Indigenous and local communities; and launched the the world’s first basic income pilot for rainforest communities.
Our funding
EarthPercent first supported Cool Earth in August 2022 with a grant of £10,000 towards the roll-out of Cool Earth’s Rainforest Lab project.
The project provides the tools for forest conservation research in the form of infrastructure, access to power, IT hardware, communications technology and software to help local indigenous communities monitor the forest themselves, so they can identify and respond to emerging threats to their rainforest in real time, rather than learn of disturbance to their trees from our team in the UK, often too late to protect them.
This first grant helped enable the roll-out of further Rainforest Labs following the pilot project in 2021/22 and exploration of new sites to scale to in the three largest tropical rainforests, the Amazon and Congo basins and New Guinea
Since then, our Expert Advisory Panel has continued to support Cool Earth, and to date have granted a total of £40,000 towards the Global Rainforest Lab project which falls across two of E/P’s action areas: Protecting Nature and Climate Justice. In 2023/24, 9 new rainforest labs were completed, with a total of 11,000ha of rainforest now protected by Cool Earth’s labs.
Cool Earth was also an inspiring contributor to E/P’s 2024 and 2025 annual impact events held in London helping to showcase the impact of the money the music industry has helped us to raise so far.
Read more about Cool Earth HERE.