Leonardo DiCaprio and Jeff Bezos lead $200M project to save 100 of globe’s most threatened species

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Foundations funded and co-founded by Leonardo DiCaprio and Jeff Bezos have launched an initiative committing $200 million to revive 100 of Earth’s most threatened species, 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 call it the largest single fund in history dedicated exclusively to recovering critically endangered species.

DiCaprio has for years been developing the idea of a major concerted effort to help species whose habitats and future existence are threatened by climate change.

In 2021, he and Re:wild co-founder Wes Sechrest, a biologist who serves as the organization’s CEO, met with the Amazon-founding mega billionaire Bezos and his wife, former TV news reporter and host Lauren Sánchez Bezos. He serves as chair and she as vice chair of the Bezos Earth Fund.

The meeting led to a series of conversations with local governments, environmental groups and Indigenous people on how best to reverse the decline of their most vulnerable species. Those conversations eventually led to the Phoenix Species Project.

Animals the initiative is seeking to sustain include:

– The golden-crowned sifaka, a lemur from Madagascar

– The Hickory Nut Gorge green salamander, a lungless tree-dweller that lives only in a small canyon in North Carolina.

– The Visayan warty pig, endemic to islands in the Philippines.

– Mexico’s Cozumel harvest mouse, which lives only on an island off the Yucatán Peninsula.

– The pink land iguana, found only on Wolf Volcano in the Galápagos Islands.

– The Malayan pangolin, also known as the Sunda pangolin, native to Southeast Asia.

– Tanzania’s pancake tortoise, named for its flat, flexible shell.

– The starry night harlequin toad, known and named for its black-and-white evening sky appearance, found only in the mountains of Colombia.

– Attenborough’s long-beaked echidna, a monotreme, or mammal that lays eggs, from New Guinea named in honor of the 100-year-old naturalist and narrator-of-nature David Attenborough.

The project’s goals include giving long-term sustenance to successful but fleeting smaller efforts.

“We’ve protected the golden-crowned sifaka for years on 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 getting a grant from the initiative, said in a statement. “This funding, this global platform and technical support change what is possible.”