Racks 4 Acres

Powering the Cloud. Preserving the Clouds

Our Racks 4 Acres campaign is designed to raise awareness of the vital conservation work undertaken by Rainforest Concern whilst at the same time, providing us with a simple and practical way of recognising the impact that our own operations have on the environment.

With the "Racks 4 Acres. Powering the Cloud. Preserving the Clouds" campaign, we are sponsoring an acre of Ecuadorian cloud rainforest for every additional Megawatt of power that is consumed within our 5 UK Data Centres since September 2010.

As a leading UK provider of cloud computing services, we are particularly keen to support Rainforest Concern's Neblina Reserve Cloud Forest project in Ecuador and we're hoping to secure between 500 and 1000 acres of precious cloud forest through the Racks 4 Acres campaign.

Rainforest Concern is the British based conservation charity established to protect threatened natural habitats, particularly rainforests and the biodiversity they contain, together with the people who still depend on them for their survival.

Working closely in partnership with local organisations the charity currently works in Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Peru, Colombia, Costa Rica, Panama, India, Sri Lanka and Romania and since 1993 has helped secure protection for over 2.5 million hectares of forest. The charity works with indigenous communities to gain legal recognition of their ancestral forests and strongly believes that it is only by involving the local people can lasting solutions be found to protect the world's remaining native forests.

Cloud or montane forests make up no more than 2.5 per cent of the world's tropical forests, but they harbour a disproportionately large number of the world's species. This wealth of biodiversity includes the wild relatives and sources of genetic diversity of many of man's staple crops, such as beans, potatoes and coffee.

Ecuador is considered one of the seventeen mega diverse countries, with forty-six different types of ecosystems; the country is the most bio diverse in the world with respect to its surface area. Furthermore it is home to the Galapagos Islands, the world heritage site, forever associated with evolutionary biology, both historic and scientific.

Ecuador holds second place in the world for its diversity of orchids and amphibians, and at 369, has the highest density of mammal species per metre anywhere. An average of 200,000 hectares of the Ecuadorian forest disappears every year.

We are delighted to be supporting this project, in conjunction with Rainforest Concern.