100 conservation projects are looking for funding after USAID’s closure

Filed 1h ago · Via Mongabay · The Buffoon Desk

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Myst

Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

Photo: Prime Minister's Office · GODL-India · via Wikimedia Commons

A new analysis from One Earth Partners, founded by former USAID officials, documents what the agency's dismantling has meant for conservation work in Kenya, Bangladesh, Peru, Colombia and Vietnam. Projects training officials to monitor Amazon deforestation, fund anti-poaching patrols at Mozambique's Gorongosa National Park, and build nature-based tourism in Bangladesh have stalled or collapsed.

USAID spent $366 million on biodiversity conservation and $257 million on climate adaptation in fiscal year 2024 alone, money the Trump administration's dismantlement of the agency removed from the global ledger. Kenya's Maasai Mara Wildlife Conservancies Association lost a five-year, $6.5 million grant, laid off ten staff, and cut its budget by 72%.

Some organizations have found replacement funding from other governments or private philanthropy. One Earth Partners has published a list of 100 former USAID-backed projects still looking for someone to pick up the tab.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK

Cutting foreign aid always sounds like savings until you find out what it was actually buying, in this case elephant corridors and deforestation monitors nobody else was funding. The administration got to cross a line item off a budget; the Maasai Mara got ten fewer people watching the fence. That is not a trade, that is just moving the cost somewhere harder to see.

Source: Read the original at Mongabay → Scored: Myst · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0

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