Los Angeles – Foundations funded and co-founded by Leonardo DiCaprio and Jeff Bezos have launched an initiative that commits $200 million to recover 100 of the most endangered species on Earth, including endangered lemurs, salamanders, pangolins, pigs and echidnas.
DiCaprio’s Re:wild and the Bezos Earth Fund are leading the Phoenix Species Project, the groups announced Tuesday. They describe it as the largest single fund in history dedicated exclusively to the recovery of critically endangered species.
DiCaprio has spent years developing the idea of a major coordinated effort to help species whose habitats and future existence are threatened by climate change.
DiCaprio and Wes Sechrest, co-founder of Re:wild and a biologist who serves as the organization’s executive director, met in 2021 with Bezos, the mega-billionaire founder of Amazon, and his wife, Lauren Sánchez Bezos, a former reporter and television news anchor. He is president and she is vice president of the Bezos Earth Fund.
The meeting led to a series of conversations with local governments, environmental groups and indigenous people about how best to reverse the decline of their most vulnerable species. Those conversations eventually led to the Phoenix Species Project.
1 / 10 | In photos: the 10 most endangered species of fauna and flora in the world. Vaquita porpoise (Phocoena sinus). Its current population has been reduced by 99% compared to the specimens censused in 1998 and it is estimated that there are no more than ten specimens alive. – EFE Agency
Among the animals that the initiative seeks to support include:
- The golden-crowned sifaka, a lemur from Madagascar
- The Hickory Nut Gorge green salamander, a lungless arboreal animal that lives only in a small canyon in North Carolina.
- The Visayas warty pig, endemic to islands in the Philippines.
- The Cozumel harvest mouse, from Mexico, which lives only on an island off the Yucatan Peninsula.
- The pink land iguana, found only on the Wolf volcano in the Galapagos Islands.
- The Malayan pangolin, also known as the Sunda pangolin, native to Southeast Asia.
- The Tanzanian pancake turtle, named for its flat, flexible shell.
- The “starry night” harlequin toad, known and named for its black and white night sky appearance, found only in the mountains of Colombia.
- Attenborough’s long-beaked echidna, a monotreme—or egg-laying mammal—of New Guinea, named in honor of 100-year-old naturalist and nature storyteller David Attenborough.
The project’s goals include providing long-term support to smaller efforts that have been successful but short-lived.
“We have protected the golden-crowned sifaka for years with a budget that would never match what this species deserves, but letting it go extinct was never an option,” Tiana Andriamanana, executive director of Association Fanamby, one of the groups that will receive a grant from the initiative, said in a statement. “This funding, this global platform and technical support changes what is possible.”
This story was translated from English by an AP editor using a generative artificial intelligence tool.