The climate emergency was this year’s highly topical Guardian and Observer charity appeal cause, and our aim was to raise money to plant, protect and renew forests and woodland in the UK and the Amazon. So far, with your help, we have raised £825,000. With just a couple of days to go there’s still time to give.

Your donations will be shared among our four appeal charities – Global Greengrants Fund UK, Trees for Life, Trees for Cities, and the Woodland Trust. Each does fantastic work to restore and defend nature and the planet.

Thanks to your generosity, the Woodland Trust will continue its ambitious programme of woodland expansion and protection across the UK, Trees for Cities can pursue its vital work of greening and revitalising forgotten spaces in some of our most deprived communities, and Trees for Life will increase investment in its stunning project to rewild 10,000 acres of the Scottish highlands.

In the Amazon basin of South America, Global Greengrants Fund UK will continue to support local groups fighting to protect their forest communities from the encroachment of loggers, farmers and mining corporations. Protecting local people’s land rights and ensuring indigenous forest management are often the surest way of protecting the rainforest.

There has been much in the global climate to feel gloomy and pessimistic about, and just in the five weeks since we kicked off the appeal we have been confronted with a major climate-related catastrophe in Australia with the devastating fires that have caused such death and destruction.

Such events may shock but are rarely a surprise. Around the world in the last few years there has been an increase in extreme weather, which both creates chaos now and stores up problems for the future: flash floods and storms; melting ice caps; suffocating smog; droughts and wildfires; record high temperatures, and failing crops.

Ultimately the route to solving the climate emergency lies in courageous political and economic action by governments uniting behind the consensus around the climate science and determined to slash fossil fuel burning and protect nature.

Tree-planting and forest and woodland protection remains hugely important: it offers a practical, human-level way to protect the environment, wildlife and biodiversity; it provides natural solutions to global heating by absorbing carbon from the atmosphere; and the very beauty of trees provides a majestic reminder of a world under threat as well as a symbol of hope.

As always we would like to thank all of you who have so far given – over 11,000 of you – for your generosity and solidarity, and your commitment to a fairer, greener and more just society. Your donations are an inspiration – and they will make a difference.

The appeal continues until midnight on Sunday 12 January. Readers can donate online here or send a cheque (payable to the Guardian and Observer charity appeal 2019) to: The Guardian and Observer charity appeal 2019, Charities Trust, Suite 20-22, Century Building, Tower Street, Liverpool, L3 4BJ.