Across the world, conservation projects reel after abrupt US funding cuts

Conservation projects across the world are reeling from the Trump administration’s abrupt decision to shut down USAID and freeze foreign aid, as groups large and small scramble to fill sudden funding gaps for nature and wildlife protection. According to more than a dozen people interviewed by Mongabay this past week, the move could jeopardize hard-fought gains on problems like wildlife trafficking and deforestation.

The U.S. government provides around $60 billion per year in nonmilitary foreign aid, much of which goes to emergency humanitarian relief, along with health and other assistance programs. A small but globally significant portion of that sum is spent on nature conservation. In 2023 alone, USAID provided $375.4 million to biodiversity projects, according to a report it submitted to the U.S. Congress last December, financing activities as varied as ranger patrols in protected areas, habitat restoration, and community conservancy operations.

This funding has traditionally enjoyed broad bipartisan support in Congress, allocated through a “biodiversity earmark” in the annual appropriation bill for the Department of State.

“Whoever’s at the level of president or in control of the House, it hasn’t really changed funding for biodiversity. Historically it’s something that both parties have rallied behind,” said one aid worker with experience in wildlife trafficking projects in Africa, who asked to remain anonymous.

Last year’s bill directed $365 million toward conservation programs worldwide. With the decision to halt all existing foreign aid programs for at least 90 days, conservation workers say they’re not sure how much of that money — if any — will now reach its intended recipients. Dozens of major USAID contracts have already been cancelled, including some that funded biodiversity projects.

On February 13, a US federal judge ordered the Trump administration to restore paused foreign aid, although it’s unclear when or if the ruling will come into effect.

“Who knows whether there will be a resumption? We don’t, because there’s nobody to tell us, and nobody to ask,” said James Isiche, Africa director for the International Fund for Animal Welfare.

Mongabay’s sources say the effects of the aid freeze are already being felt on the ground, for example with the loss of support for wildlife rangers’ salaries forcing reserve managers to reduce field patrols inside forest reserves. Many organizations declined to comment on the record, citing uncertainty over the future of their funding awards and fear of retribution, while others said they will likely be forced to lay off some of their staff in the coming months.

‘We don’t have a plan right now’

The Congo Basin is the world’s second-largest rainforest, covering 2.4 million square kilometers (nearly 1 million square miles) across 12 countries. The bulk of that forest is in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where charcoal production, logging and mining result in the loss of around 5,000 km2 (nearly 2,000 mi2) of forest every year. The U.S. government has been one of the biggest funders of conservation projects in the DRC and surrounding countries, primarily through USAID’s Central Africa Regional Program for the Environment (CARPE), which began in 1995.

Through CARPE and other projects, the U.S. government has sent hundreds of millions of dollars to the Congo Basin since then, funding wildlife rangers in national parks, remote sensing, and even eco-friendly coffee businesses. Since 2019, USAID and the U.S. Department of State have provided more than $23 million to Virunga National Park alone, home to around a third of the world’s remaining mountain gorillas.

The Global Land Analysis & Discovery lab at the University of Maryland is one of CARPE’s partners. The team, led by Matthew Hansen, has been working to help government authorities in the Congo Basin accurately map their forests in order to receive payments for keeping them intact. With the freeze in CARPE’s funding, four researchers from the region who’ve been working with his lab have lost their salaries.

“We just had the plug pulled on us, and we don’t have a plan right now,” Hansen told Mongabay. “We might have a plan, but we’re not banking on USAID any time soon.”

Along with Virunga, the U.S. provides funds to other national parks in the DRC, including Garamba and Kahuzi-Biega. According to a report by the congressional Government Accountability Office (GAO) released last year, between 2020 and 2022 USAID awarded nearly $50 million in grants that included support for rangers in Africa.

The Virunga Foundation declined to respond to Mongabay’s questions about the status of its current grants.

“We’re working with park rangers to keep track of the environment and the flora and fauna and all that, and at the same time we’ve got these pressures on the outside from local residents. You’re trying to get them alternative pathways, and it’s really difficult to do that,” Hansen said.

Even with tens of millions of dollars in U.S. funding, finding a balance between competing demands on the Congo Basin’s forests was already an uphill climb. An extended pause in that funding — let alone a permanent cut — will make it tougher still, Hansen added.

“If you take away support for civil society, government, and the environment, it’s not going to be good at all. I mean it’s ridiculous that we even have to argue that,” he said.

A global shockwave

Understanding the full scale of the disruption to global conservation efforts has been made more difficult due to the decision to delete large parts of USAID’s website. Documentation on aid projects that was publicly available just weeks ago are no longer online, blurring the picture of what’s at risk of being cut.

But conservationists around the world say the effects of that disruption are arriving fast. On the Indonesian island of Sumatra, former Goldman Prize winner Rudi Putra told Mongabay that his organization’s work monitoring the Leuser Ecosystem, a 25,000-km2 (9,700-mi2) rainforest inhabited by rhinos, tigers, orangutans and elephants, has already taken a hit.

“The biggest impact is on patrols because most of our patrol teams are funded by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service,” said Putra, who heads the Leuser Conservation Forum. “This funding supports orangutans, rhinos and elephants, so with the funding cut, our patrol teams have been reduced.”

Patrols of Leuser haven’t entirely stopped, Putra told Mongabay, but to keep them going he’s had to use funds that were meant to build a ranger outpost.

According to another of Mongabay’s sources, a REDD+ project meant to protect Cambodia’s Lumphat Wildlife Sanctuary is also facing immediate difficulties, with local groups considering bank loans as a stopgap to finance verification requirements before a looming deadline.

“If they don’t get those funds, they can’t protect that forest,” said a conservation worker familiar with the project and who requested anonymity. “I mean if you look at the deforestation rate around there, it’s just been huge.”

In southern Africa, the Namibia Nature Foundation, which works with community conservancies, lost funding it was using to combat wildlife crime.

“If you’re working on the ground investigating either poaching or trafficking in certain areas, and midway you stop paying people to carry on that work, that has immediate effects on certain landscapes and the strong potential for a rise in wildlife crime in that particular area,” said Resson Duff, portfolio funding director for Maliasili, which supports community-led conservation groups in 15 African countries, including Namibia.

USAID has been a long-time backer of such conservancies in Kenya. Along with smaller private conservancies, they now cover around 18% of Kenya’s landmass, facilitating migration patterns in landscapes outside national parks, where most of the country’s wildlife live. One study found that 84% of the large mammals in the Maasai Mara were found inside community conservancies.

A few of these conservancies are largely self-financed through tourism proceeds, but the majority rely on donor funding, with USAID playing the biggest role, responsible for as much as 60-80% of their budgets in some cases.

Dickson Kaelo, head of the Kenya Wildlife Conservancies Association, said they had been expecting USAID grants of nearly $13 million this year.

“The USAID funding was really filling this important gap in the conservation of nature, particularly for communities that live in far places,” he told Mongabay.

Without that funding, he said he worries that options other than conservation might start to look appealing to them.

“Remember, these are agricultural lands owned by communities, so if conservation is not supporting their livelihoods, the natural thing is that some of [them] will lease their land to agricultural farmers. And what that means is more fencing, more cutting down of trees, and basically pushing wildlife further into the periphery,” Kaelo said.

Frozen in place

Most of the conservation organizations Mongabay spoke to said USAID wasn’t their only source of funding, and while they may have to lay off staff or scale back on their activities if the grants don’t resume, they aren’t likely to shut down their operations entirely. But the sudden, unexpected withdrawal of funding has put them in the difficult position of choosing among equally urgent priorities.

“Where security rangers were being paid, are they going to be laid off? And what happens to the vacuum that’s there? Is there going to be insecurity for wildlife, and is human-wildlife conflict going to increase?” asked Isiche of the International Fund for Animal Welfare.

U.S. government funding for conservation hasn’t been free of criticism. Last year, the GAO said human rights safeguards for grants given to wildlife rangers were inadequate. Aid recipients have also complained of cumbersome reporting requirements and a mismatch between the distant priorities of U.S. officials and the realities on the ground.

“I don’t want to turn around and sound like we don’t need this money, but it twists a lot of these organizations into shapes they don’t want to be in,” said Duff from Maliasili. “It makes them hire staff and do projects that maybe weren’t the most necessary for them.”

Duff said the crisis spurred by the sudden shuttering of USAID and pause on U.S. foreign aid could lead other donors and philanthropic organizations to take a second look at their funding models.

“This is triage, we have to plug a lot of holes, but maybe over the long term we can start to think what is good money and how can resources better support people who are actually working at the point of impact,” she added.

With biodiversity protection already suffering a global financing shortfall, losing a major source of support could have far-reaching consequences for nature in both the short and long terms. As bills and salaries come due and the effects of the aid freeze start to register in the world’s forests and other landscapes, conservation groups are wondering how to plug the hole — or if they can at all.

“Fundraising is not something where you just go out and get resources,” Isiche said. “It’s something you plan for a long time, and there’s no guarantee of success.”

Hans Nicholas Jong in Indonesia, Gerry Flynn in Thailand, and Philip Jacobson in Thailand contributed to this report.

Banner image: Community rangers at the Northern Rangeland Trust’s Biliqo Bulesa Community Conservancy in northern Kenya, which has received funding from USAID. Image by Ashoka Mukpo for Mongabay.