Environment

Our Themes

Our areas of expertise are here.

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Migration

Human Trafficking & Modern Slavery

Social Inclusion

Public Health

Global warming is happening right now

The concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) in our atmosphere, as of May 2020, is the highest it has been in human history. Seefar is working to draw down carbon from the atmosphere because climate change is impacting the world’s most vulnerable people disproportionately.

Likewise, entire populations in low-income countries are losing their means of subsistence and the resilience of their communities due to the over-exploitation of the environment and the loss of biodiversity.

The twin challenge is immense:

Data shows that average global temperatures in 2019 were 1.1°C degrees warmer than the 20th century average.
The five warmest years on record between 1880 and 2019 have all occurred since 2015, while the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) says we have just endured the hottest decade since records began in 1850.
Current global warming is occurring roughly 10 times faster than the post-ice age warming.
In 2020, the sea reached its highest level since precise measurements began in 1993.
The Arctic is thawing, a process which has accelerated since 2016 and especially in 2019.
The average size of vertebrate (mammals, fish, birds and reptiles) populations has declined by 60 per cent between 1970 and 2014.
In 2020, Australia saw devastating fires that killed 1 billion animals and was flamed by the hottest Australian summer on record. In Africa, Victoria Falls stopped flowing, in Europe some Alps were devoid of snow and the Arctic is now so devoid of ice in summer that commercial shipping routes now easily navigate once dangerous waterways.

Seefar’s Approach

The good news is that science has told us what we need to do. Seefar has developed and is launching projects and commercial initiatives that remove carbon from the atmosphere and restoring biodiversity.

Our carbon drawdown initiatives and our biodiversity restoration initiatives are designed to provide livelihoods to communities who face the dual risk of livelihood loss alongside being at higher risk of exploitation, displacement and social exclusion.

Our commercial initiatives are designed to change behaviour of consumers and generate long term funding for our development projects.

By some estimates, natural climate solutions such as restoring degraded forests could create jobs at a rate more than six times higher than investment in the oil and gas industry.

Roughly 3.2 billion people are currently impacted by land degradation worldwide. Restoration is critical and cost-effective. Every US$ 1 invested in restoration generates, on average, 10x that amount in benefits.

Just 0.7% of the world’s forests are coastal mangroves, yet they store up to 10 times as much carbon per hectare as tropical forests. Conserving coastal ecosystems is often more cost-effective than human-made interventions. In the Maldives, preserving the natural coral reef is four times cheaper than building a sea wall for coastal protection, even after 10 years of maintenance costs. Natural coastal ecosystems are being destroyed from the onslaught of temperature rises, overfishing and plastic pollution. Plastic pollution is driving huge biodiversity loss in our oceans.

Learn more about our Climate Mitigation & Adaptation Programme.