Prince's Trust Rainforest Project Gains Further Sponsorship

The Prince’s Rainforests Project (PRP), founded by His Royal Highness The Prince of Wales, recognises the global role played by rainforests in climate change and aims to achieve consensus about how the rate of deforestation might be slowed and stopped.

The Prince’s Rainforests Project (PRP) was set up in 2007 by HRH The Prince of Wales following reports from leading climate change experts, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, to promote awareness of the urgent need to take action against tropical deforestation. The Prince of Wales has long been concerned about climate change and about how destruction of the world’s rainforests contributes to rising temperatures and sea levels.

There is a growing awareness of the need to urgently protect the world’s rainforests, their people and their resources. The project is working alongside other governmental and non-governmental initiatives to find a solution to deforestation for the rainforests nations, with the aim of making the trees worth more live than they are dead.

Tropical rainforests absorb nearly a fifth of all man-made CO2 emissions around the world, which helps greatly to minimise the effects of climate change. However, these same rainforests are currently being destroyed at the rate of an area the size of a football pitch every four seconds.

To make matters worse, when the rainforests are burnt down - to clear land for commercial farming or mining, for example - they release all the CO2 that they have stored back into the atmosphere. The alarming scale of this rapid burning of the rainforests around the world means that CO2 emissions from tropical deforestation are actually higher than from the entire global transport sector.

The project is also working to inform and engage public interest on this subject, collecting mass support to make rainforests central to any future climate change strategy.

Sponsorship from various businesses continues to grow, with Sony being one of the largest manufacturing and research companies to be supporting the project.

The partnership between Sony and the Prince’s Rainforests Project began over a year ago with a dedicated category created for the Sony World Photography Awards to raise awareness about the impact of tropical deforestation on climate change. The winner announced in Cannes in April 2009 was Daniel Beltra, who beat off stiff competition from some of the world’s finest environmental photographers to win the Sony fully-funded assignment to document the major rainforest regions of the world.

Sony issued a statement on it's website announcing it's support for the project: "Sony recognises its responsibilities to future generations with environmental responsibility playing a significant part in our ethos. We believe in providing a positive impact through technology in creating solutions for climate change."

The Sony statement goes further, "Most people will never get to experience the beauty of the rainforests first hand and we hope that Daniel’s pictures will play a crucial role in raising awareness of the importance of preserving the rainforests in the fight against climate change. We hope that people who see the pictures and visit the exhibitions will feel compelled to take action and sign up to the Rainforest SOS campaign to stop tropical deforestation."

Three stunning interactive exhibitions to be held in London, Paris and Berlin combine Daniel Beltra’s photography from The Amazon, The Congo and Indonesia with Sony technology. Our aim was to allow people to see the glory of the rainforests and understand their plight.

Prince's Trust Rainforest Project website can be accessed here

Sign the Trust's on-line petition against deforestation here

Source: Sony Press Release

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