Season’s greetings – and our thanks for another great year!

The annual festive break is once more upon us and a new year is just around the corner – and on behalf of everybody here at EIA’s London HQ, I’d like to wish all of our supporters everywhere season’s greetings and all best wishes for a peaceful and productive 2014.

.As ever, the past year has been another busy and successful one, a year in which we:
• revealed the huge financial cost to Mozambique (fourth least developed country in the world) of the illegal timber trade;
• confronted China with its double standard of stimulating domestic markets for tiger skins and body parts despite signing up to international conservation initiatives;
• persuaded internet giant Google to remove thousands of advertisements from its Japanese Shopping site promoting products for sale from endangered whale and elephant species;
• played a key role in securing CITES protection for Siam rosewood;
• encouraged a Japanese company to stop selling pet treats made from endangered fin whales;
• revealed how international banking giant HSBC is bankrolling palm oil firms destroying rainforests essential for the survival of Bornean orangutans;
• played a crucial, leading role in the European Union’s tentative deal to partially ban the use of a group of super greenhouse gases.

Our schedule for 2014 looks set to be even busier, with full calendars for all of our campaigns – Forests, Global Environment, Cetaceans, Elephants and Tigers – involving more fieldwork and undercover investigations; naturally, we can’t go into details for security reasons.

EIA is only a small organisation; we’re also, pound for pound, one of the hardest-working and most effective. A huge part of our success is the enthusiastic backing of our supporters, whether making financial donations or sharing word of our activities via social media.

Remember – our successes are your successes, because we couldn’t do any of this without you!