40 years of standing up for rainforests:
Rainforest Rescue

Tropical timber

Our first major campaign, which continued for many years, targeted tropical timber imports. European timber companies, including German ones, were plundering the world’s tropical forests with the help of officials and governments – very often through corruption.

Our persistence paid off: people recognized the problems linked to tropical timber and boycotted it; cities and municipalities also stopped using it.

But labels such as FSC for supposedly sustainable wood have undermined the move away from tropical timber.

Logging continues to put forests and communities at risk – in Nigeria, for example. President Tinubu has banned the export of logs, but criminals pay little attention. They load their trucks with impunity. Instead, the police go after environmental defenders like our partner Martins Egot.

Palm oil

Spring 1999: “Burning for breakfast” is the headline in Regenwald Report. At the center is palm oil from Malaysia and Indonesia for consumers in Europe. Corporations such as Unilever, Nestlé and Henkel are importing more and more palm oil for spreads, sweets and detergents.

At first slowly, then more clearly, the protests of environmental and human rights defenders begin to have an effect. Palm oil is recognized as a problem, and politics and business respond to the pressure. In December 2014, EU rules on food labeling are tightened, allowing consumers to choose products without palm oil. Many manufacturers switch to locally grown vegetable oils.

Biofuels

Around the turn of the millennium, plant-based raw materials are meant to replace crude oil and protect the climate. In Europe, palm and rapeseed oil go into diesel tanks and combined heat and power plants – backed by subsidies worth billions and mandatory blending quotas. Corn, wheat and sugarcane are turned into ethanol as a gasoline additive.

The result: plantations replace rainforests across Asia and Latin America. As food crops are turned into fuel, prices rise – and people’s plates are made to compete with car tanks.

Then came a success: the EU changed course and is phasing out palm oil as a fuel by 2030. Many countries act well ahead of the deadline, including Germany in 2023.

Mining

Mining is an increasing threat to rainforests, largely out of public view. At first, companies focus on bauxite, iron ore and gold. Then, in the mid-1990s, a company sought to mine copper in Ecuador’s cloud forests. The project was stopped, thanks in part to our long-standing partner DECOIN. We have worked together for 30 years.

The transition to electric mobility is also driving rainforest destruction. Cars and their batteries require huge quantities of cobalt, coltan, graphite and lithium. On Sulawesi, nickel mining is devastating entire landscapes. Indigenous communities – with women’s groups often at the forefront – are resisting the destruction, with our support. Together, they have protected almost half a million hectares of rainforest from clear-cutting.

Oil

Oil is extracted not only in the deserts of the Persian Gulf but also in rainforests. Ecuador’s Yasuní National Park has been a focus of resistance to oil drilling for more than 40 years. In 2023, our partner alliance YASunidos helped win a historic referendum to keep the oil beneath part of Yasuní in the ground. The government is now trying to delay the decision’s implementation. We are continuing to press for it to be honored.

The oil industry is expanding in Africa as well. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, oil concessions and exploration plans threaten Virunga National Park, its forests and the gorillas that live there.

But the industry is meeting determined resistance. “Stop EACOP,” demand communities and environmental defenders in Uganda, referring to the planned East African Crude Oil Pipeline. Many are students who know that peaceful protest can lead to arrest and imprisonment.

Green deserts: tree plantations for paper

Paper and cardboard consumption is booming – and so is demand for eucalyptus and acacia pulp. Forests are cleared to make way for monoculture plantations, often illegally and on Indigenous land. Orangutans and tigers lose their habitat, soils erode and flooding worsens. Indigenous peoples, including the Pataxó, and small-scale farmers are resisting the hostile “green deserts.” We stand with them, because plantations are not forests.

Rainforest on our plates

Meat, eggs and dairy come at a high cost: rainforests in South America are burned to produce beef and grow animal feed. Vast soy monocultures, doused with pesticides, replace them.

Cattle ranching is pushing deeper into forests and savannas across 3 million square kilometers.

But Indigenous peoples, including the Akroá Gamella and the Munduruku, are resisting. We support them alongside a dozen organizations challenging the soy and meat industry.

Indigenous forest rights

Indigenous peoples are among the world’s most effective forest guardians. Their knowledge and ways of life help protect around 80 percent of the Earth’s biodiversity. Secure land rights are therefore one of the strongest defenses against deforestation and land theft. The Amazon shows why: vast areas are recognized as Indigenous territories.

In Indonesia, forests are state-owned. Only in recent years have Indigenous peoples begun to secure legal recognition of their territories. On Borneo, Sumatra and in Papua, we support communities as they navigate the bureaucracy.

For the first time, many are mapping their land, documenting its biodiversity and recording their history.

Indigenous peoples suffer not only from the destruction of nature but, at times, from conservation policies too. They are forced from their land to make way for national parks. The Maasai in Tanzania and the Batwa in the Congo have faced this injustice. This model is known as “fortress conservation” – and we reject it outright.