How do you measure impact? By its reach. By the lives it affects. By the allies brought into the movement.

The future of a 16-year logging moratorium in Democratic Republic of the Congo to protect the country’s pristine rainforests, home to the world’s most diverse range of great apes, was in great jeopardy during summer 2018 even after dozens of conservation organizations had mounted a campaign to prevent the freeze from being lifted. “Lifting the moratorium on new logging licenses would be seen as one of the single biggest threats to the ape populations of the Congo Basin,” says Simon Counsell, executive director of the Rainforest Foundation UK.

Aerial photography from camera-mounted drones over the degraded farm and swampland habitat of the Western Chimpanzee in Sierra Leone, West Africa, may be an effective new tool to document biodiversity impact in advance of planned large-scale agricultural development in the area. A team of international scientists, researchers and sanctuary workers collaborating since 2016 on conservation in southern Sierra Leone’s Moyamba district, where conditions are ideal for oil palm plantation, has been testing a helicopter drone to collect data on numbers and behavior of around 34 chimpanzees.

Fear-mongering anti-LGBT sermons and shunning of openly LGBT clergy, clerics, and other faith leaders are commonplace at centers of worship on every continent, but a group of senior religious figures united in calls for inclusivity and mutual respect in New York last year. “It’s really about applying the golden rule when it comes to our lives; to treat people as you would have them treat you,” said Rev.

When a parliamentary standing committee in Namibia agreed in 2017 to address anti-trans discrimination in the southern African country, it was a long-awaited milestone for Jholerina Brinette Timbo, a trans resident of the country’s capital Windhoek. “It was very emotional for us; we’ve been waiting for it to happen,” says Timbo.

As soon as the existence of a new Indonesian orangutan species was confirmed by scientists in 2017, it became clear that all 800 individuals are in immediate and long-term danger from a major project to build the island of Sumatra’s largest hydroelectric dam. The dam builder, PT North Sumatra Hydro Energy, backed in part by the Bank of China, is moving quickly to clear significant areas within the pristine forest home of the newly discovered so-called Tapanuli orangutan.

Two days after the June 12, 2016, massacre at the Pulse gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, Marco Quiroga was on a plane back to the central Florida city where he grew up. “The shooting felt like that safe space was robbed from me,” says Quiroga, who in August of the same year helped to establish the Contigo Fund, a project of Our Fund, to channel donations for medical and legal services to the families of the 49 people killed and more than 50 injured or affected.