Located in 27 acres of lush rainforest and native eucalyptus-rich bushland in Queensland, Currumbin Wildlife Hospital is an integral part of the Currumbin Wildlife Sanctuary. The area is now a heritage-listed zoological garden, home to native mammals, reptiles, birds, amphibians and more.

Since its opening, the sanctuary and the hospital, have been able to survive and thrive thanks to the enthusiastic and generous support of the local community and the development of ecotourism. However, funding is needed more than ever due to the increasing number of hospitalized patients and the increasing cost of operating facilities.

The large and costly expenses required to treat such diverse wildlife include drug provision, medical equipment, site maintenance, administrative staff, food, and disease operating costs. hospital, labour and resources to release them into the wild. 

In recent years, the average number of animals hospitalized has increased to 14,000 per year, with an average cost of $120 each, while the typical cost for a koala patient is more than $7,000. 

At Rewards4Earth we are very grateful for the hard work the Currumbin Wildlife Hospital does to help, protect and restore our local and national wildlife. For some species, time is no longer a luxury afforded. Help us support the Currumbin Wildlife Hospital by downloading our Supporter App found on the App Store or Google Play. You can help make a difference using our App for your day-to-day shopping to earn Erth Points and contribute to the Currumbin Wildlife Hospital’s invaluable work as well as help us to Save the Planet via The Rewards4Earth Foundation when you spend at participating businesses.

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The Asian elephant populations can be found in 13 countries across South and Southeast Asia, sadly their numbers are fast declining with an estimated 30,000 – 50,000 left in the wild.  Both the Sumatran and Borneo elephants are heading towards extinction with less than 1,500 remaining. Elephants have large home ranges and with the unprecedented rate at which the rainforest is disappearing due to drought, forest fires, illegal logging and growing human populations, their future is bleak if we do not take immediate action.

Elephant migration plays a vital role in balancing out the natural ecosystem, they travel over vast areas of land in search of enough vegetation and water sources to meet their needs. Feeding on a variety of plants, they disperse seeds in their dung which help generate new growth ensuring their ecosystem constantly replenishes and evolves.  Elephant herd sizes consist of 20 or more predominantly female elephants with the matriarch being the eldest female. Known for their intelligence and empathy, elephant herds have an intricate social structure. The males tend to leave the herd at adolescence and many lead fairly solitary lives, though some come together in bachelor pods.  

The decimation of their habitat to pave the way for unsustainable agriculture, plantations, mining, human settlements and infrastructure is not only compromising their food sources, herd and migration routes, but is also placing the future of this migratory species at risk by creating human-elephant conflict as they compete for the same resources.

Sadly 70% of the time, elephants venture into unprotected areas, they are often found travelling through human-dominated areas resulting in the damage of crops, property and even human injury and death.  The outcome of such incidents is retaliation, often by poison, thus threatening their species even more.

As well as poaching elephants for their ivory, skin and meat, their population is also threatened by snares placed in the forest areas they cross.  Such traps are set by villagers to catch wild pigs or deer; however, elephants are becoming casualties, often dying from infected wounds.  In addition to these unfortunate facts, many elephants are still being exploited and experience lives of hardship in captivity due to unregulated tourism practices throughout Asia.

Family plays a vital role in herd behaviour and when one of these gentle giants is affected by man, it disrupts their social structure leaving them even more vulnerable.

The BKSDA Jambi Wildlife Ambulance Team, supported by the Frankfurt Zoological Society (FZS), providing essential medical care to clean an infected wound

The Rewards4Earth™ Endangered Species Preservation Mandate is supporting The International Elephant Project (IEP) and together we are determined to help protect and restore the fast declining populations of the giant elephants of Asia.

In July 2021, The Rewards4Earth Foundation donated to the IEP.  We are impressed with the level of commitment that the IEP shows by ensuring our contributions work as hard as possible.  By scaling back their operational costs, more money is spent where needed – protecting elephant populations and their environment.

We will continue to support the IEP and need your help.

We do not ask for your donations, all we ask is that you sign up and collect Erth™Loyalty Rewards Points.

• The IEP run an Elephant Adoption program to monitor and protect elephants in the Bukit Tigapuluh Ecosystem in Sumatra and the Nam Pouy National Protected Area in Laos.  This is a great initiative where you can see first-hand how your contributions are helping the save the elephants one elephant at a time.

• The IEP has been supporting the Elephant Conservation Centre in Laos which includes the only elephant hospital in the area.  This initiative also sources and protects substantial amounts of land which allows for socialisation and natural breeding.  Donations are used to fund ranger teams who patrol and protect this 190,000-hectare ecosystem which houses both wild and rewilded Laos elephants.  Sadly, the COVID-19 Pandemic has severely disrupted the funds that they rely on from ethical eco-tourism resulting in vital elephant populations being at further risk from poaching and habitat destruction.

• With poaching and deforestation on the rise and declining fundraising donations, the Wildlife Ambulance teams are on the verge of scaling back their efforts or worse becoming extinct themselves.  Their teams on the ground consist of vets, who not only provide life-saving assistance to injured and displaced elephants in Sumatra but who also work tirelessly to train the next generation of vets.  They are in desperate need of $50,000 by the end of this year to be able to continue their vital work.

With less than 400 left living in the wild in Sumatra, Indonesia, they are now listed as Critically Endangered.  Sadly, we humans failed the Balinese and Javanese tigers who were pushed to extinction in the 1900s mainly through devastation of their habitat, poaching and traps. We call it the Human -Tiger Conflict.  The reality is tigers like so many other innocent species in the wild are not able to compete with greedy humans and unless we drastically change our ways and our demands on our natural resources, these majestic animals will become just mere pictures in books or Wikipedia pages.

Unfortunately for tigers, poaching alongside corruption is still rife despite being illegal under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species.  The illegal trade for wildlife is worth billions on the black market.  With a lack of law enforcement and weak penalties for poachers despite being a protected species in Indonesia, tigers and other endangered wildlife remain at risk.

“This is the fastest, most comprehensive transformation of an entire landscape that has ever taken place anywhere in the world including the Amazon. If it continues at this rate all that will be left in 10 years is a few fragmented areas of natural forest surrounded by huge man-made plantations. There will be increased floods, fires and droughts, but no animals,” said Yuyun Indradi, political forest campaigner with Greenpeace south-east Asia in Jakarta.

The International Tiger Project (ITP) is a non-for-profit project for tiger conservation, rainforest protection and partnerships with the local community to help protect and save the entire ecosystem and biodiversity of habitats shared by tigers. Their vision is that all tigers live in the wild in secure and viable populations.  In order to help them achieve their vision, we fully support the ITP through our Rewards4Earth™ Foundation Endangered Species Mandate. We are determined not to see the Sumatran tiger end up like their extinct cousins – a lot more can and must be done with your help.

The ITP has set up Wild Protection Units (WPU) which are committed to monitoring, preserving and protecting this valuable land. They have dedicated anti-poaching patrols, wildlife monitoring and human–wildlife mitigation systems in place.

The WPU patrol work alongside local communities to educate them but also ensure tigers and humans co-exist in harmony.  The local communities who live and work on the land are also suffering as their land is swallowed up by large corporate conglomerates. Together the WPU and the locals work side by side to collect information on illegal activities, wildlife tracks and sightings.  The Ecosystem Monitoring Units have multiple camera traps. In order to correctly identify each tiger and monitor their movements, the tigers need to be filmed on both flanks to identify their markings. The traps themselves are expensive and need heavy duty chains and locks so they are not stolen.   Nothing is safe from greedy humans – it really is a jungle out there!  As well as using their advanced camera tracking, the foot patrols focus on the detection of, and more importantly, the prevention of poaching.  The teams patrol at least 15,000 hectares every month to uncover any evidence of illegal activities and to collect wildlife distribution data. On their travels, snares are deactivated and illegal activity is reported to the field office and passed on to law enforcement.

By providing such thorough data via their tracking methods, the ITP objectives have a positive knock-on effect to not only protect and preserve tiger numbers, but also other endangered species in the region by ensuring the rainforest is a safe haven and all who live under its majestic canape are able to thrive.

With the COVID-19 pandemic shifting our focus from the environmental movements to our own mortality, it is vital we do not turn our back on the planet and all species we are fortunate to share it with.

You can help by being part of the solution to help us Save the Planet.  Please click here.

The Orangutan Project is a team of passionate wildlife experts, committed to protecting Critically Endangered orangutans. They have been working for over 20 years to save orangutans from extinction. It’s a vibrant, fast-growing and effective not-for-profit organisation that supports a variety of projects focused on protecting remaining fragmented orangutan populations including fighting deforestation and habitat loss. The projects funded by The Orangutan Project not only include direct orangutan conservation, such as orangutan rescue, rehabilitation and release programs but also forest habitat preservation and restoration, education, research and local community partnerships.

Within the next ten years, The Orangutan Project hopes to increase the number of wild orangutans under permanent protection to 8,000 to ensure all distinct populations of all subspecies of orangutan survive indefinitely. This requires them to help secure 450,000 acres of prime lowland forest and protect it with 180 Wildlife Protection Rangers.

The objectives of The Orangutan Project have many flow-on effects that both protect other Critically Endangered species, such as the Sumatran tiger, elephant and rhino, as well as indigenous and local communities.

Visit www.theorangutanproject.org to find out how you can adopt an orphaned orangutan or support their game-changing work to protect rainforests.

Orangutans are the most intelligent creatures on the Earth after humans, and they adapt to their environmental conditions by passing on culture from generation to generation. Their extinction is an individual story of horror as they are macheted and burnt alive as agricultural pest. Almost 80% of orangutan habitat has disappeared in the last 20 years, and we are losing over 6,000 orangutans a year.

Extinction in the wild is likely in the next 10 years for Sumatran orangutans and soon after for Bornean orangutans. Both species are classified as Critically Endangered according to the International UNION FOR Conservation of Nature (www.iucn.org)

Orangutan rainforest habitats are vanishing at an unprecedented pace as a result of deforestation and clearing of the land for pulp paper and palm oil plantations, with the remaining forests degraded by drought and forest fires. Every hour 300 football fields of precious remaining forest are ploughed to the ground across South East Asia to make way for monoculture plantations including palm oil. Palm oil is used in everything from food to soap and is found in over half all packaged items on our supermarket shelves.

Poaching orangutan infants and hunting for meat also threatens the species. Mothers are often killed for their babies, which are sold on the black market as pets. Rescued infants are rehabilitated at orangutan rescue centres, if you are willing to help, you can adopt an orangutan orphan here www.theorangutanproject.org/adopt/

Our contribution