Author: Rhett Ayers Butler

Most people are familiar with the world’s “big cats”: Lions, tigers, leopards, jaguar, puma, and cheetah. But far fewer people know about the much larger number of small cat species, which range from the ancestors of domesticated house cats to the flat-headed cat to the ocelot. Yet, like big cats, these small cats play important [Continue reading]

In March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic shut theatres across North America and beyond. What’s the receipt of two Primetime Emmy Awards, a Tony Award, and nominations for four Academy Awards, and three Golden Globe Awards to do? For Jane Alexander, an acclaimed film and stage actress who is up for her eighth Tony Award nomination [Continue reading]

Over the past five years, Mighty Earth has emerged as one of the most influential advocacy groups when it comes pushing companies to clean up their supply chains. The group, which had its origins as the Forest Heroes campaign before evolving into a standalone non-profit organization, has targeted companies that produce, trade, and source deforestation-risk [Continue reading]

Environmental causes have traditionally attracted only a small share of philanthropic support in the United States: Between 1-3% of annual giving, depending on how the issue area is defined. But that may be changing as the impacts of climate change worsen and awareness of the links between a healthy planet and healthy society rises. Sonali [Continue reading]

China and the United States account for nearly half the world’s carbon dioxide emissions from energy, while the two countries’ resource consumption is among the biggest threats to global biodiversity. These issues make China and the U.S. major targets for environmental activists like Greenpeace, one of the world’s most prominent advocacy organizations. Despite the difference [Continue reading]

In 2018, philanthropist Hansjörg Wyss put $1 billion toward initiatives to help a range of stakeholders conserve 30% of the planet in its natural state by 2030 via protected areas, other effective conservation measures (OECMs), and Indigenous- and community-led conservation. One of the products of that commitment is the Campaign for Nature, an advocacy, communications, and [Continue reading]

Few people likely associate the United Arab Emirates, a federation of seven mostly oil-rich emirates on the Western shores of the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman, with biodiversity conservation. But the next president of one of the world’s most prominent conservation groups, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), could be from [Continue reading]

The past 18 months have been a time of upheaval around the world, prompting a wide range of companies, institutions, and organizations to re-evaluate how they operate. The conservation sector has been no exception: Worldwide concern about injustice and inequity, the impacts of the pandemic, and the worsening effects of global environmental degradation has accelerated [Continue reading]

Last month, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology announced the receipt of a $24 million donation to catalyze the field of conservation bioacoustics, which uses sound data to to understand and monitor species, habitats, ecological processes, and environmental health. The benefactor is Lisa Yang, an investor and philanthropist, who serves on several boards and has degrees from Columbia University and Cornell [Continue reading]

Determining the success of a conservation project is rarely as simple as measuring how well forest cover has been maintained or the headcount of an endangered species. The multifaceted nature of most conservation projects means that many factors need to be monitored and evaluated using a range of metrics to determine whether a real impact [Continue reading]

Kahuzi-Biega National Park in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is renowned for its biodiversity, including Grauer’s gorilla — an endemic subspecies — and around 350 bird species. The area is also home to the Batwa people, who are highly dependent on its forests for their livelihoods and cultural traditions. But forests in this region [Continue reading]

Since the early 2000s, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation has invested more than half a billion dollars into efforts to protect the Amazon, making it the largest private donor of conservation efforts for Earth’s largest rainforest. The foundation has supported a range of interventions, including establishing protected areas and Indigenous territories, using technology to [Continue reading]

In the wake of George Floyd’s killing last year, long-running concerns about discrimination, colonial legacy, privilege, and power dynamics in conservation have gained prominence, forcing many organizations in the sector to reckon with their origins and how they operate. Current and historic injustices against Indigenous Peoples and local communities in the name of establishing protected [Continue reading]

Destruction of Earth’s largest rainforest is accelerating ahead of the region’s peak fire and deforestation season, reveals data released today by Brazil’s national space research institute INPE. According to INPE’s satellite-based deforestation tracking system, DETER, forest clearing in the Brazilian part of the Amazon amounted to 1,391 square kilometers, an area 24 times the size [Continue reading]

The Malaysian state of Sarawak was until recently home to some of the last truly nomadic peoples of Borneo, who roamed its wild and rich rainforests as they had done since time immemorial. Starting in the early 1980s, industrial logging companies moved deep into Sarawak’s hinterland, tearing down forests, forcing forest peoples from their traditional [Continue reading]

Efforts to maintain protected areas and safeguard wildlife can at times feel futile given the persistent onslaught of encroachment, poaching and extractive activities. At the extremes, top-down conservation approaches may tend toward militarization, while bottom-up conservation can seem to lack the scale needed to have meaningful impact. But at the root of many conservation challenges, [Continue reading]

Protecting Africa’s charismatic megafauna often come first to mind when Westerners think about conservation in Africa. But there’s a lot more to conservation efforts across the continent beyond elephants and lions. Conservationists often need to navigate the complexities around balancing the needs of local communities with the needs of wildlife, adapt to rapid changes in [Continue reading]

In the late 2000s and the early 2010s, the Brazilian palm oil industry told us that oil palm plantation expansion would take a different path than in Southeast Asia, where the sector destroyed vast areas of native forests, increased the risk of fire by draining peatlands, and pushed Indigenous and local peoples off their traditional [Continue reading]

A coalition of groups, including a newly formed organization backed by actor Leonardo DiCaprio, have mobilized $43 million for efforts to restore degraded habitats in the Galápagos Islands, an archipelago renowned for its endemic species and central role in scientists’ understanding of ecology and evolution. The Galápagos initiative has three immediate priorities: Helping restore Floreana [Continue reading]

Western corporations have been inflicting environmental damage overseas for generations, but the sharp rise in the scale of China’s international ambitions and operations in recent years has put a spotlight on the impact of Chinese companies abroad. The emergence of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, the foreign policy strategy put forth by Xi Jinping that [Continue reading]

It’s no secret that humanity is abusing the world’s oceans. We’re overfishing at all levels of marine food chains, we’re annihilating critical habitats from mangroves to coral reefs, and we’re polluting global seas with plastic, agricultural run-off, and carbon emissions. The challenges standing in the way of addressing these issues however are immense. At the [Continue reading]

Like many sectors, conservation has increasingly been reckoning with issues around inclusivity, representation, justice, and equity. Many of these stem from the sector’s origins in the West, where conservation has tended to be the domain of the well-off. Conservation goals were thus often pursued at the expense of peoples who were traditionally the most dependent [Continue reading]

The past year has been difficult for much of Latin America: The pandemic has hit the region harder than most, a series of natural and manmade disasters has adversely impacted communities from Honduras to Brazil, and violence is surging. On the environmental front, the pandemic has undercut livelihoods associated with ecotourism and research, environmental law [Continue reading]