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.
The Phoenix Species Project
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.
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, and the Visayan warty pig, endemic to islands in the Philippines.
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.
Original reporting: Dallas TX News (HLL/CB) — read the source article.
