In a year where we’ve seen frequent reminders of the scale and accelerating speed of the climate and nature crisis facing our world, we called on everyone urgently to help us bring our world back to life.
We’re incredibly grateful that despite the continuing challenges, more than 246,000 new people gave us their backing during the year.
This vital support led to many successes, notably at the UN climate summit in Glasgow – COP26. Major breakthroughs we pressed for at COP26 included a commitment that was announced by the then chancellor to make the UK the world’s first net zero-aligned financial centre – and an agreement, now supported by more than 140 countries, to reverse forest loss and land degradation by 2030.
We also helped achieve an increase during the year of around 10% in the number of critically endangered black rhinos in Kenya, and enabled community organisations in Australia to restore 350 hectares of koala habitat following the wildfires there. Also, alongside British Antarctic Survey, we launched Walrus from Space, where we called on the public to become citizen scientists by searching for walruses in thousands of satellite images.
Read on to find out about these and many other successes, together with our full financial review.
Our successes
Messages from our Chief Executive and Chair
Our achievements and performance
How we’ve fared this year in each of our main goals to help us halt the loss of nature.
Averting dangerous climate change
We helped achieve a huge breakthrough at the UN climate summit in Glasgow to align the finance sector with net zero emissions. We also helped ensure the crucial role of nature in limiting warming to 1.5°C was formally recognised at the summit. And through our Land of Plenty report, we developed a vision to share with UK governments, farmers and others – for landscapes that will support the UK’s target of keeping 1.5°C alive. Read about these successes and much more here.
Creating a sustainable food system
This year we brought together five major food retailers to take action for nature and work towards our ambitious target of halving the environmental footprint of UK shopping baskets by 2030. And we pressed for the UK’s Environment Act to include due diligence to ensure imports of ‘forest risk’ commodities such as soy and palm oil are not from illegally deforested areas. Find out more about these and our other achievements under this goal.
Restoring threatened habitats and species
In the Amazon our work included supporting a hugely ambitious initiative to expand and improve Colombia’s protected area system. And in Brazil, we’ve supported a remote monitoring system that enables the monitoring of illegal invasions of Indigenous lands across 6.4 million hectares. We also started work on a four-year project focusing on protecting wildlife and improving people’s wellbeing across vast community lands in Kenya and Tanzania. You can also read about many of our other international and UK-based programmes to address nature, climate and sustainable development challenges.
Growing support
We’re incredibly grateful that despite a challenging environment, 246,000 new people have given us their support, and we’ve seen an increase in financial contributions to our work. Find out about our State of the Planet Address, Art for Your World project and how our supporters helped us reach every MP in the country through our We Won’t Forget campaign. And read about work our new partnership with Aviva is supporting, as well as our existing partnerships with HSBC, Reckitt, Sky and Tesco.
Financial review
Here’s a summary of our income and expenditure for the year ending 30 June 2022, along with equivalent figures for the previous year.
Read more detail in our full Financial Statements.
