In this article, Jungle Berry founder Nicholas Watson examines the links between fair trade jewellery and the environment and explains how Jungle Berry puts its environmental principles into action with its fair trade jewellery range.

Fair trade is recognised as a force for protecting the environment, with its emphasis on the use of naturally harvested materials and sustainable production methods. Jungle Berry's fair trade jewellery is no exception.

In fact, our fair trade jewellery comes from one of the most environmentally sensitive regions of the world: the Amazon rainforest of Brazil. Click here to learn more about how what inspired us to source fair trade jewellery from the Amazon.

That's why it's doubly important to us that our fair trade jewellery is a force for good, both socially and environmentally.

At Jungle Berry, we believe you can't hope to create a sustainable future for the Amazon rainforest without involving the people who live there.

And that's where fairly traded jewellery comes in.

Making fair trade jewellery offers artisans in the Amazon an incentive to value the standing forest and its sustainable riches, not felled timber or cleared land. Of course, we at Jungle Berry don't claim we can protect this vast area on our own. But we believe our example of sourcing, designing and marketing fair trade jewellery shows that it's possible to integrate human activity into the Amazon eco-system in a sustainable way.

So how does all this work in practice?

- Local people make our fair trade jewellery; many of our producers have moved from rural to urban areas in the Amazon. Continued demand for fair trade jewellery helps them and their children to retain links with the forest. Supporting local people also helps to promote environmental awareness at the community level.

- Production of Jungle Berry's fair trade jewellery is artisanal and does not rely on carbon-intensive production methods commonly associated with mass-produced goods.

- The materials used to make our fair trade jewellery are sustainably harvested.

- Your fair trade jewellery will be supplied to you in eco-friendly packaging. That means NO wasteful over-packaging. Your fair trade jewellery will come in a re-usable bag with a recycled label printed using eco-friendly inks.

- We offset the carbon emissions derived from our travel to and from the Amazon region.

- To view our fair trade jewellery collection, just click here. To learn more about our production methods, click here. And read our full set of fair trade principles here.

- During the past 40 years, close to 20% of the Amazon rainforest has been cleared. That's more than in the previous 450 years combined.

- According to the Amazon Institute for Environmental Research (IPAM), forest fires account for 75% of Brazil's total greenhouse gas emissions. The Global Canopy Programme ranks Brazil as the world's fourth largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world.

- According to the Global Canopy Programme, one day's deforestation is equivalent to the carbon footprint of eight million people flying from London to New York.

- The Brazilian government has doubled the acreage of state-protected conservation areas to cover approximately 10% of Brazil's Amazon territory.

- The same Brazilian government also has plans to build seven dams on the Xingu and Madeira rivers, as well as roads, gas pipelines and mining projects across the region.

- According to WWF, soybean farming alone threatens forested areas equal in size to the UK by 2020. The European Union countries accounted for 49% of Brazil's soybean exports in 2005.