PC: Forbes
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and actor-environmentalist Leonardo DiCaprio have launched a $200 million conservation initiative which is aimed at helping 100 of the world’s most threatened species recover from the brink of extinction. In the year 2021, DiCaprio and Wes Secret, chief executive and co-founder of Re:wild, met with Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez Bezos, who serve as chair and vice chair respectively of the Bezos Earth Fund. The initiative’s targets include: * Golden-crowned sifaka: a lemur from Madagascar. * Hickory Nut Gorge green salamander: a lungless tree-dweller found only in a small canyon in North Carolina. * Visayan warty pig: native to islands in the Philippines. * Cozumel harvest mouse: found only on an island off Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula. * Pink land iguana: found only on Wolf Volcano in the Galápagos Islands. * Malayan (Sunda) pangolin: native to Southeast Asia. * Pancake tortoise: from Tanzania, named for its flat, flexible shell. * Starry night harlequin toad: found only in the mountains of Colombia. * Attenborough’s long-beaked echidna: an egg-laying mammal from New Guinea, named for naturalist David Attenborough, who is 100.
As reported by Fortune, the foundation backed by Bezos and DiCaprio have infield the Phoenix Species Project, which they describe as the largest single fund dedicated exclusively to recovering critically endangered species.
The program is said to offer funding, technical expertise and long-term support to conservation groups working to protect facing severe threats from habitat loss, climate change and other environmental pressures. “This funding, this global platform and technical support change what is possible,” Tiana Andriamanana, executive director of Association Fanamby, one of the organisations receiving support through the initiative, said in a statement. The initiative is being led by Re:wild, the conservation organisation co-founded by Dicaprio, and the Bezos Earth Fund, chaired by Bezos. The project came into life with the idea that DiCaprio had been developing for years around creating a large-scale coordinated effort to rescue species whose survival is increasingly threatened by climate change. The discussions were followed by consultations with governments, environmental organisations and Indigenous communities, eventually leading to the creation of the Phoenix Species Project. A major goal of the programme is to provide sustained funding to conservation efforts that have often operated with limited resources despite showing promising results. She noted that conservationists had worked for years to protect the golden-crowned sifaka despite limited budgets, adding that allowing the species to disappear “was never an option. The launch of the Phoenix Species Project comes as scientists are continuously warning about the accelerating loss of biodiversity around the world, as thousands of plans and animal species are witnessing increasing risks from human activity, habitat destruction and climate change. The organisers now hope that the fund created by Jeff Bezos and DiCaprio will help reverse declines and also create long-term recovery pathways for some of the most vulnerable wildlife of the planet. You use AI every day. Now get your AI Quotient. Take the AIQ test.