People of Herefordshire are being invited to sponsor their favourite parts of their own county in a radical new scheme to protect vital rainforest. A campaign called The Size of Herefordshire has been set up by some local people. The idea is to protect an area of rainforest in the Amazon the same size as the county, so saving wildlife, the homes of local tribes and carbon dioxide emissions.

The Size of Herefordshire is using an innovative online map which links land parcels in the county with areas of the rainforest. People are invited to sponsor 10 hectare land parcels for £5 a square, which will protect 10 hectares of rainforest in north eastern Peru, where the forest is under attack from loggers, oil prospectors and gold miners.

Potential donors are invited to go to the online map at www.sizeofherefordshire.org and look for places they know and love and might like to sponsor by double-clicking on the map. The Size of Herefordshire website gives a lot more information about the campaign.

“The Size of Herefordshire takes nothing,” says the group’s co-ordinator Jeremy Bugler, “All the money The Size of Herefordshire raises goes directly to a charity The Forest Peoples Programme who are helping the local indigenous people battle the invaders,” says Bugler, who works on the project from a small farm in Blakemere.

“We think this online map could be a real breakthrough,” says Bugler. “We got the concept of The Size of Herefordshire from the successful campaign called The Size of Wales, which has raised over £2 million to protect rainforest. But the idea of the interactive map is new and came from some very bright sparks at a company called Acclimatise, which advises companies and governments on climate change.”

“We’ll be appealing to the farmers of the county to sponsor their farms, in whole or in part, and also to industries, schools and even parishes. But the campaign is very much directed to the man and the woman in the Herefordshire streets and villages. We’d love them to choose a bit of the county they know and pitch in.” Also, school children might raise money with a school campaign.

The Size of Herefordshire website states: “We feel that Herefordshire people will have a natural sympathy with the plight of forest peoples - and will realise the value of the great tropical forests. Though Herefordshire makes up only a sixth of the West Midlands, it contains a third of the region’s ancient woodland.

“We have a wonderful variety of woodlands and forests, from Queen’s Wood at Dinmore Hill to the great woods that flank the Dore Valley, to name just two.”

Herefordshire also has a major problem with its carbon emissions. As a county, we emit more carbon dioxide per head than many other counties. Each Herefordshire person emitted on average 7.5 tons of carbon dioxide, on the figures for 2014. Yet Worcestershire people emitted 6.1 tons of CO2 per head, Shropshire folk 7.1 tons per head and the West Midlands as a whole 5.9 tons per head. There are reasons why Herefordshire has such a high total. We are a county with a lot of small villages scattered throughout it, so journey times are long. Much of the industry and agriculture we have uses a lot of energy, which is then averaged out across a relatively small population.

Nonetheless, the Herefordshire figure is high, which is why Herefordshire Council has a whole section aiming to get our CO2 right down so we are carbon neutral. But The Size of Herefordshire will help this process - every hectare of rainforest we keep standing means a lot less CO2 in the earth’s atmosphere.”

Already parcels of Herefordshire have been sponsored, some of them beauty spots like Merbach Common, Moccas Park and hill land on the borders. Lovely stretches of the Wye and woodlands are also popular with woods such as Monnington woods being sponsored.

“We hope that people will also want to sponsor their neighbourhoods and their villages” says author and educationist Geoff Petty, one of the founder members of The Size of Herefordshire.

The core group that has developed The Size of Herefordshire, all resident in the county, includes Susan Bell, a former director of the National Forest; Will Bullough who has run Whitney Sawmill (specialising in native hardwoods) for many years; and Ingrid Heatly, a specialist geography teacher in a number of the county’s schools. Backing them is a larger group of local people.

The campaigners hope that it could be a fore-runner of other “Size of” campaigns in the country. If all the counties of England protected rainforest of the same area, that would have a significant impact in saving rainforest. They hope that soon there will be a Size of Shropshire, a Size of Worcestershire and a Size of Gloucestershire. “A Size of Yorkshire? That is the big prize,” says Jeremy Bugler.

The part of the rainforest The Size of Herefordshire is helping to protect is an area of the Amazon rainforest in north-eastern Peru on the watersheds of the Santiago and Morono rivers. It is a huge area inhabited by the Wampis people who are increasingly effective in repelling loggers. Recently they declared their territory an independent region within Peru and they are benefitting already from the assistance of the Forest Peoples Programme and the first donations via The Size of Herefordshire.