Environmental projects page
Have you attended the Festival over the past two years? Find out how your environmental contributions and the Festival’s support are enacting change.
Over €1,340,000 raised to help save the planet
© South Pole / © Soneva Foundation_Climateseed / © NaturDive
SPONSORSHIP
PRIME: RESTORING THE MEDITERRANEAN COASTLINE
Location: Cannes
By: Cannes Endowment Fund (in partnership with NaturDive and BlueaLeaf Conservation)
Year: Festival 2022
The Festival is funding this project up to €50,000 excl. tax.
As the climate emergency and successive crises rumble on, the Mediterranean coastline and Cannes’ surrounding countryside are under threat. The PRIME project is tackling these issues by raising public awareness of the situation while protecting and restoring the Mediterranean’s Posidonia oceanica meadows. Native to the Mediterranean, Posidonia oceanica has a great many benefits and stores much more carbon than even the Amazon rainforest. The Festival will be supporting PRIME specifically in restoring depleted Posidonia oceanica in the Bay of Cannes.
The project ultimately aims to achieve low-carbon label status, allowing it to offer all interested parties the opportunity to offset unavoidable greenhouse gas emissions. This would make it one of the Mediterranean’s very first “blue carbon” projects, a scheme that runs alongside the forest-focussed “green carbon” projects.
The Festival’s donation will be exclusively channelled into the team’s seagrass restoration efforts.
Restoring seagrass meadows in specific areas goes some way to mitigating their decline and is an effective solution that could lead to reviving lost carbon stores and sinks and re-establishing other vital benefits that these seagrasses bring to the ecosystem. Each Posidonia oceanica restoration campaign requires a site-specific experimental study. As well as returning the ecosystem to its original state, restoration also strengthens the seagrasses and slows down their erosion.
© NaturDive
COMBATTING ENERGY POVERTY IN NEIGHBOURHOODS IN MARSEILLE
Location: Marseille
By: GERES
Year: Festival 2022
The Festival is funding this project up to €50,000 excl. tax.
In France, 3.5 million households live in energy poverty, suffering from high energy bills combined with low incomes. This initiative runs in Marseille’s La Cabucelle – Saint Louis district, an area characterised by subpar housing and a high percentage of low-income households.
The scheme aims to empower isolated families and individuals living in energy poverty by helping them to improve living conditions in their homes. Home visits are scheduled with a view to providing personalised support, in some cases leading on to emergency works (such as double-glazing and sealing cracks and gaps) conducted by Impulse Toit, a local back-to-work charity. Group workshops are in place to make households aware of their rights and existing funding, and teach them to better understand energy consumption and prevent health and safety risks.
The Festival’s donation will be used to bolster the anti-energy poverty scheme and increase the total number of beneficiaries targeted for 2022/2023.
According to a GERES estimate, it costs €1,000 to €1,500 to raise a household out of energy poverty. The association’s support ranges from providing energy advice visits to conducting emergency works and fitting equipment. These works and the materials used cost around €800. Past experiences have shown that around 10 to 20% of targeted households require this type of work.
GERES provides support for around 35 to 50 households, depending on the identified needs.
© Geres / La Cabucelle
LOCAL OFFSETTING
SUSTAINABLE FOREST MANAGEMENT PROJECT
Location: Grasse (France)
By: Ma Forêt
Year: Festival 2021
The Festival is providing full funding for this project up to €149,586.58 excl. tax.
This native Mediterranean forest in the heights of Grasse is currently seeing dieback among its Scots pine trees – some of which are over a century old – while its downy oak trees are drying out, all across a 75-hectare area. The project’s aim is three-fold: helping the forest to regenerate, preparing it for climate change, and protecting ancient trees teeming with life.
POST-FOREST FIRE REFORESTING PROJECT, CENTRE NATIONAL DE LA PROPRIÉTÉ FORESTIÈRE
Location: Grasse (France)
By: Centre National de la Protection Forestière
Year: Festival 2021
The Festival is providing full funding for this project up to €32,250.00 excl. tax.
This project was launched following the 2017 forest fire that swept through Saint-Cézaire sur-Siagne in Grasse’s back country, ravaging 53 hectares of forestland in the process. The reforestation plans involve a mix of different species and aim to rebuild the landscape at a popular sight-seeing spot.
© Ma Forêt
NATIONAL OFFSETTING
SUPPORTING AGRO-ECOLOGICAL TRANSITION IN LIVESTOCK FARMING AND REPLENISHING THE LOIRE AREA’S BOCAGE
Location: France
By: Solenat
Year: Festival 2022
The Festival is funding this project up to €90,000 excl. tax.
Deep in the heart of the Loire region, the Carbocage and livestock farming project helps protect the wooded countryside and support livestock farms in shifting towards a low-carbon approach. Participating farmers in the Loire region will be rolling out hedgerow-boosting plans: planting and improving management to capture and store carbon and foster biodiversity. The farmers will be embarking on an ecological transition to improve their carbon footprint by making changes to their livestock and growing. As an example, they will be reducing their reliance on imports by growing protein-rich feed.
This project tackles carbon and biodiversity and enjoys ‘French Low-Carbon Label’ certification.
© Q. Veron CRA PdL_Solenat
GROWING FORESTLAND ON BROWNFIELD SITES AND ABANDONED FARMLAND IN THE NIEVRE REGION
Location: France
By: Centre National de la Protection Forestière
Year: Festival 2022
The Festival is providing full funding for this project up to €62,500 excl. tax.
This project in Sauvigny-les-Bois (Nièvre) involves afforestation on former farmland spaces that are currently brownfield sites. The afforestation plans involve a diverse mix of tree species. The project will have positive knock-on effects on protecting the water here (the site is on the banks of a stream) and welcoming in members of the public. This initiative will help capture several thousands of tCO2, and is a carbon-offsetting scheme that will be granted the French Ministry for Ecological Transition’s Low-Carbon label.
FARMLAND AFFORESTATION PROJECT
Location: Cantal (France)
By: Centre National de la Protection Forestière
Year: Festival 2021
The Festival is providing full funding for this project up to €70,000 excl. tax.
Deep in the heart of the Loire region, the Carbocage and livestock farming project helps protect the wooded countryside and support livestock farms in shifting towards a low-carbon approach. Participating farmers in the Loire region will be rolling out hedgerow-boosting plans: planting and improving management to capture and store carbon and foster biodiversity. The farmers will be embarking on an ecological transition to improve their carbon footprint by making changes to their livestock and growing. As an example, they will be reducing their reliance on imports by growing protein-rich feed.
This project tackles carbon and biodiversity and enjoys ‘French Low-Carbon Label’ certification.
BOCAGE CARBON-OFFSETTING & ECO-METHANE PROJECT
Location: France
By: PUR Projet and Bleu Blanc Cœur
Year: Festival 2021
The Festival is providing full funding for this project up to €114,540.00 excl. tax.
Deep in the heart of the Loire region, the Carbocage and livestock farming project helps protect the wooded countryside and support livestock farms in shifting towards a low-carbon approach. Participating farmers in the Loire region will be rolling out hedgerow-boosting plans: planting and improving management to capture and store carbon and foster biodiversity. The farmers will be embarking on an ecological transition to improve their carbon footprint by making changes to their livestock and growing. As an example, they will be reducing their reliance on imports by growing protein-rich feed.
This project tackles carbon and biodiversity and enjoys ‘French Low-Carbon Label’ certification.
© Pur Projet
INTERNATIONAL OFFSETTING
THE KARIBA PROJECT: PROTECTING FORESTLAND AND FAUNA & FLORA CONSERVATION
Location: Zimbabwe
By: South Pole
Year: Festival 2022
The Festival is funding this project up to €380,695 excl. tax.
On the shores of Lake Kariba on the Zimbabwe-Zambia border, this project protects close to 785,000 hectares of forestland and a great many wild species. Spanning four national parks and eight safari reserves, this green corridor is a safe haven for many vulnerable and endangered species, particularly African elephants, lions, hippopotamuses and southern ground hornbills.
The project also helps develop community gardens, facilitates access to healthcare and offers bee-keeping training to empower local communities in achieving self-sufficiency.
© South Pole
Wood-fired ovens distribution project
Location: Myanmar
By: Climate Seed
Year: Festival 2022
The Festival is funding this project up to €199,920 excl. tax.
Myanmar has the third-highest rate of deforestation in the world. What’s more, rural families in Myanmar invest up to 40% of their income – or the equivalent in time – into buying and gathering wood to heat their homes. This project in Myanmar involves distributing over 30,000 wood-fired ovens, allowing households to decrease the amount of wood they use and lower household spending on the resource, while relieving pressure on the country’s forests. This sparks a drop in air pollution, improving local communities’ general health, too.
© Soneva Foundation / Climateseed
MUSKITIA LANDSCAPE PROTECTION project
Location: Honduras
By: South Pole
Year: Festival 2021
The Festival is funding this project up to €64,312.50 excl. tax.
The Muskitia Landscape Protection project works to protect mangroves from deforestation by providing natural protection against flooding, erosion and storms while filtering pollutants in the water. Muskitia Landscape Protection works closely with eight Indigenous and Afro-Honduran communities to roll out sustainable activities and training schemes in order to improve livelihoods and living conditions for local people while safeguarding Honduras’ invaluable cultural and natural heritage.
© South Pole-Muskitia Blue Carbon
RIBEIRIHNOS REDD project
Location: Brazil
By: Eco Act
Year: Festival 2021
The Festival is funding this project up to €84,500 excl. tax.
Because of their “traditional peoples” status, local communities in the Pará region have no land ownership deeds. This project supplies them with ownership certificates for land already owned by these communities in order to protect the forest from illegal logging and poaching.
© Ribeirinhos