Conservation International Gets $261 Million Windfall

Bijal P. Trivedi
National Geographic Today

December 10, 2001

In the largest grant ever awarded to a private environmental
organization, Conservation International will receive U.S. $261
million from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation over the next ten
years.

The money will be used to identify and protect large
tropical wilderness areas and "biodiversity hotspots"—25 regions
in 40 countries that together make up only 1.4 percent of the planet's
land surface but harbor more than 60 percent of all terrestrial
species on Earth.

Many of these hotspots have lost more than 90 percent of their original habitat. There is tremendous concern that without protection, these areas could disappear in the next few years, said Russell Mittermeier, president of Washington-based Conservation International.

The grant will enable Conservation International to offer communities in developing countries an economically viable alternative to logging and mining interests, which often harm the regions' rich biological resources.

"Often communities in developing countries sell forests to support health and education needs," said Gustavo Fonseca of Conservation International. "With this new grant, we can compete directly with logging interests by offering communities the same or greater level of revenue to protect their forests."

The conservation group plans to establish trust funds that will give the newly protected areas a stream of steady income to support park management and further land acquisition.

Fonseca said one of the biggest impediments to conservation is the lack of local expertise and management skill in biologically rich regions that are threatened by logging, mining, and slash-and-burn agriculture.

Conservation International wants to use some of the new grant to train local people in how to develop scientifically and economically based conservation strategies for their regions. The plan is to establish Centers for Biodiversity Conservation—the first four in the Andes, Brazil and the Guianas, Madagascar, and Melanesia. These will also provide a base from which to mobilize the scientific community.

Conservation International also plans to create a global network of research field stations that will monitor and track changes and trends within tropical forest ecosystems.

The money will help create an "early warning system for biodiversity," said Fonseca. "Currently we don't have any stations for tracking biodiversity or a standard way to measure and track the effects of human activities on plant and animal populations," he said.

Fonseca noted, for instance, that a decline in amphibian populations was found rather serendipitously to be a global phenomenon when an international group of scientists were discussing local phenomena and many reported seeing declining frog populations in their own regions.

Through standardized monitoring by a network of field stations, global trends such as these could be identified more quickly, he said.

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