Why systemic action is essential
Across oceans, forests, farms and financial markets, the climate and nature crises often look fragmented. Different geographies. Different pressures. Different solutions.
But when you listen closely to the organisations working on the front lines, a clear, shared story emerges.
The charities supported by the Global Returns Project (GRP) are not trying to fix symptoms in isolation. They are reshaping the systems that drive nature loss in the first place: how we fish, how we farm, how we invest, how we enforce the law, and how we value our planet.
GRP’s portfolio of charities includes Blue Marine Foundation, ClientEarth, Global Canopy, Rainforest Alliance, Rainforest Trust, and Trillion Trees — which when woven together, provide an opportunity for high-impact climate and nature action that really works.
Together, these charities span 85+ countries, protect millions of acres, and empower communities worldwide.
The ocean: the planet’s life support
The ocean regulates our climate, absorbs around a quarter of global carbon dioxide emissions, supports biodiversity, feeds billions of people and even helps produce the oxygen we breathe. In fact, blue carbon habitats such as salt marshes, seagrasses and mangroves can store carbon up to five times faster than terrestrial forests. But the ocean’s supply of natural services are dependent on healthy, functioning ocean ecosystems and improved climate policy.
Blue Marine’s work spans from specific ecosystem protection to international policy change. From securing bans on destructive activities in Marine Protected Areas to elevating overlooked ecosystems like salt marshes onto the global stage, their approach is relentlessly evidence-led.
By turning science into action, Blue Marine helps ensure that ocean protection is not treated as optional but essential in climate infrastructure. Their success in shifting UK policy on marine protection shows how sustained advocacy can move governments from aspiration to enforcement.
The law: setting the rules of the game
If the ocean tells us why protection matters, the law determines how protection happens.
ClientEarth’s work starts from a blunt insight: many environmental harms persist not because we lack commitments, but because those commitments are ignored. Laws exist to protect people, nature and the climate — but often without enforcement or procedures to check accountability.
ClientEarth approaches the legal system with this in mind. They help improve laws, build capacity so communities and regulators can use them, and take strategic legal action when governments or companies are breaking the rules.
Whether supporting communities harmed by industrial pollution or challenging financial institutions and fossil fuel expansion, ClientEarth’s work turns abstract sustainability goals into obligations that must be met. This is how environmental protection moves from loose promise to expected practice.
Markets: making the invisible visible
While law sets boundaries, markets decide what happens within them. And as Global Canopy makes clear, today’s markets systematically exclude, degrade, and destroy nature.
Trillions of dollars of global finance currently drive deforestation and ecosystem destruction, while only a fraction flows towards protection and restoration. This is the course of business as usual, in a system that attaches values to the loss of nature.
Global Canopy exists to change that. By following the money and building tools that expose how supply chains, investments and national economies depend on nature, they make hidden risks, visible.
Platforms such as ENCORE, TRACE and Forest IQ allow companies, investors and regulators to see where their activities rely on ecosystems — and where they are causing harm.
The power of this approach lies in focus. Rather than treating nature loss as an overwhelming global problem, Global Canopy helps decision-makers identify hotspots, priority actors and practical next steps.
Agriculture: healing landscapes while feeding the world
Agriculture drives around a third of global emissions and the majority of biodiversity loss – but is system the growing global population is inherently dependent on.
Rainforest Alliance approaches this tension through regenerative agriculture. This means a transition away from extractive, monoculture systems towards practices that heal soils, regenerate ecosystems and support livelihoods.
What makes Rainforest Alliance distinct is their scale. Through decades of certification, landscape programmes and partnerships with global supply chains, they already work with millions of farmers across millions of hectares. Through Rainforest Alliance, regenerative agriculture can be a tool for climate action, biodiversity protection and more sustainable supply chains.
Forest Protection: supporting what still stands
Tropical forests store vast amounts of irrecoverable carbon and untouched biodiversity, across systems that regulate climate and air quality around the world. Yet, today’s forests face risks of deforestation triggered by demanding market forces: logging, mining, energy and more. Rainforest Trust focuses on a climate solution that sounds obvious: keeping intact forests standing.
Rainforest Trust’s model is simple and powerful: they work with local partners to secure legal protection for forests before they are destroyed, and employ satellite monitoring to ensure that their protections last.
The results speak for themselves. Nearly all forest protected through Rainforest Trust’s work remains standing – decades later.
Forest Restoration: growing forests back – properly
Protection alone is not enough. In many landscapes, forests have already been lost or fragmented. This is where Trillion Trees comes in.
Trillion Trees is not about planting as many saplings as possible. It is about restoring functioning ecosystems – growing the right trees, in the right places, in the right way. That means prioritising native species, working with local communities, and committing to long-term stewardship rather than short-term planting targets.
Restoration projects can reconnect divided forest blocks, allowing wildlife to move, ecosystems to stabilise, and people to coexist with nature more safely.
By focusing on ecological integrity, Trillion Trees shows how restoration can deliver durable benefits for climate and biodiversity in the long term.
One story, many leverage points
Taken together, these organisations reveal true impact.
Each works at leverage points where change can scale policy, law, markets, land rights, community systems, enforcement and more. Each recognises that the climate and nature crises are not failures of knowledge, but failures of governance.
This is why GRP exists: so that philanthropy can unlock change far beyond the size of any single donation.
The evidence is there. The solutions are known. The tools exist. You can help tackle the climate crisis by donating to the Global Returns Project today.