Grant Associates, the Bath-based international landscape architecture practice, has strengthened its commitment to supporting environmental and social change for the better by becoming a corporate partner of Rainforest Concern, the city-based charity.
Rainforest Concern has helped protect more than 5m acres of rainforest since it was founded 28 years ago, with a wide range of successful conservation projects in across the globe from Chile and Costa Rica to India and Romania.
The charity’s work includes creating hatcheries for endangered leatherback turtles in Costa Rica, protecting rare spectacled bears and eagles in Ecuador and empowering rural women to re-forest the Western Ghats in India.
Funded entirely by grants, donations, sponsorship schemes and annual membership programmes, it recently launched corporate partnership opportunities to selected businesses, with Grant Associates becoming one of the first to pledge its support.
Grant Associates’ support is in line with the practice’s pledge to ‘act global and act local’,
Globally-recognised for its environmentally driven work such as the iconic Supertrees and Gardens by the Bay in Singapore and the Tower of London Superbloom project, Grant Associates will directly support Rainforest Concern to deliver on its ambitious goals.
These include the upcoming launch of a project to encourage UK landowners to twin the acreage of their land with the purchase and protection of an equivalent area of rainforest in the Tropical Andes – the most biodiverse region on the planet.
Rainforest Concern corporate partnerships manager Megan Witty said:
“We are delighted to partner with Grant Associates and are great admirers of the practice’s wonderful landscape architecture work, bringing people closer to nature and helping to address the increasing threats of urbanisation, climate crisis and biodiversity extinction.
“As a fellow Bath-based organisation with a similar ‘local-yet-global’ outlook, we are very much looking forward to working with the practice on a number of projects, including the expansion of our Neblina Cloud Forest Reserve in Ecuador to create protected ecological corridors for threatened species such as Andean bears – which Paddington was based on – and also our new Forest Twinning programme, due to be launched in the autumn.”
Grant Associates director and Landscape Institute Fellow Peter Chmiel, pictured, added: “Environmental and social responsibility lies at the heart of our work as a practice and we recognise the climate and biodiversity emergency as the defining challenge of our times.
“As we focus on investing in research, creating partnerships to share knowledge and formulating more detailed plans to guide us through the challenges ahead, we are delighted to now become a Rainforest Concern corporate partner.”
He said the Grant Associates had always approached the design of landscapes with a clear focus on people’s place in nature.
“Preserving the world’s existing rainforests and the biodiversity they contain is arguably the best, most natural and cost effective means available to combat the climate crisis and protect the indigenous people dependent on the forests for survival,” he added.
“Today, with climate change, biodiversity loss, human poverty and migration all such huge issues impacting our world, we need to act global and act local. We are very excited to support a Bath-based charity with shared values.”
Other Rainforest Concern corporate sponsors include Actual Experience, the Bath-based advanced analytics firm, and Armedangels, the German eco-fashion brand. Its supporters include Bath brand and design studio Mytton Williams and Bath-based The Green Stationary Company.
To find out more about Rainforest Concern visit https://www.rainforestconcern.org
Rainforest Concern photos courtesy of Murray Cooper
