The China Taoist Association, the umbrella organisation for all 40 million Taoists in China, is calling on its members to stop using endangered wildlife in traditional medicine products. Sacred Gifts are catalysts for action. They are conservation templates for religious followers around the world-a community that has influence over 5 percent of the planet's landmass and is capable of having an incredible impact on efforts to save the natural world. Other Gift pledges include Muslim fishermen helping to save turtle nesting sites in Zanzibar and the Islamic government of Saudi Arabia establishing the country's first ever biosphere reserve. In devising new ways of protecting nature, religious diversity may be the secret to how to live differently and more caringly with nature.
All faiths have environmental teachings.
What we see in these 26 Sacred Gifts are these teachings becoming real, changing lives and our relationship with nature. The initiative for Sacred Gifts follows a more than decade-long involvement of WWF with religious communities stemming from a 1986 meeting in Assisi, Italy where leaders of the world's major faiths were invited to join conservationists to explore religious views on the environment.