This year, I'm setting out on a two-part almost entirely solo walk from Canterbury to Rome along the Via Francigena, an ancient pilgrim route which stretches 2000km across five countries: the United Kingdom, France, Switzerland, Italy and the Vatican City.

It crosses the Channel between Dover and Calais, and the Alps by the Colle del Gran San Bernardo – where I fervently hope to see at least one enormous St Bernard dog.

I might need the legendary barrel of brandy tied to its collar by the time I haul myself to the top of the Alps; I have experience of long-distance walking, but never abroad, and never a solo walk of such colossal magnitude.

Although not a person of faith, I was inspired by the exhortation of Pope Francis to undertake a ‘Pilgrimage of Hope’ this year. I'm walking to raise funds for the work of Plant Your Future, a charity which gives hope by seeking to address the interlinked problems of climate change, biodiversity loss, and poverty.

Plant Your Future works in the Western Arc of the Peruvian Amazon with more than a thousand smallholder farmers who have previously cut down their parcels of rainforest, trying, but failing, to ranch cattle successfully and grow subsistence crops.

In razing the forest, they've depleted their soils and many now experience a precarious life of poverty.

Plant your Future seeks to ‘Plant Hope and Grow Change’ by teaching the smallholder farmers to practise sustainable agroforestry, providing native tree saplings grown in PYF’s tree nurseries with which to reforest their land.

So far more than three quarters of a million native trees have been planted. And as I put one foot after another making my slow way across Europe, the farming families that Plant Your Future supports are hard at work in the Amazon, making the most of the wet season to plant tens of thousands more.

As part of Plant Your Future’s ‘Seed to Self-Sufficiency in Five Years’ programme, farmers are provided with all the tools, equipment, training and skills to make their tree farms a success.

All with a view to supporting their families and their land, and securing a sustainable income from the sale of orchard crops such as cocoa, copoazu and limes.

A green economy is growing and thriving in the remote areas where Plant your Future works. This means stable local jobs in transport and planting, and opportunities particularly favourable for women, in the charity’s tree nurseries and their brand-new seed bank.

Plant Your Future also provides career paths for those working as part of their technical teams on the ground, who run the farmer field schools and support the farmers in planting and tending their rainforest farms.

And the landscape is benefitting. Ecosystem connectivity creates restored habitats and wildlife corridors for the forest fauna, and farmers are seeing the biodiversity return to their land as their trees grow (unbelievably rapidly in the tropics!) and the local micro-climates recover.

Tropical rainforest is the most effective ecosystem for taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and storing it, to the tune of nearly 450 tonnes per hectare. To put this in context, each hectare of regrown rainforest can store the equivalent of a million car miles.

With the help of Plant your Future, Peruvian farmers are working towards a goal of planting one million native rainforest trees by the end of this year.

Plant Your Future was founded and is chaired by my good friend Jenny Henman, a woman of tireless energy, expertise and commitment.

I would be so grateful if you could support us both, me in my walking endeavours and Jenny in realising her vision for rainforest restoration and sustainable agriculture, by donating to my Pilgrimage of Hope fundraiser. Any donation, great or small, is hugely appreciated by me, Jenny and all who work for or benefit from Plant Your Future.

Your gift will be put to effective work transforming lives and landscapes as the farmers support and ‘keep the land, restoring ‘the beauty of creation’ by caring for our one, precious, endangered ‘common home’.

Thank you.