Environment

The National Science Foundation and the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation are partnering to support a new program, to be administered by NSF, that will support conservation science and science-informed conservation practice in the United States. Together, this partnership anticipates providing up to $8 million for science-based solutions to environmental challenges.

The Paul G. Allen Family Foundation is a Global Alliance Founding Partner of The Earthshot Prize, launched by Prince William, which will incentivize change and help repair our planet over the next ten years. Each year, the prize will fund five ambitious efforts to restore our planet.

The Global Fund for Coral Reefs is a blended public and philanthropic funding effort to catalyze private investments in coral reef conservation and restoration. These initial contributions will be used to operationalize the fund, develop a pipeline of investable projects, and implement promising early projects.

Researchers from the Puget Sound Institute are leading a $4.8M collaborative project to integrate existing environmental models to provide a cohesive picture of the entire Sound ecosystem under future conditions of climate change and population growth. Human populations and stressors originating from land development and climate change threaten freshwater, nearshore, and estuarine ecosystems. The connections between these areas are poorly understood, and these systems should not be studied one-by-one. Comprehensive data and analyses are needed to make informed conservation, restoration, and development decisions.

The Kelp Monitoring Program builds on our 2016 four-year grant with Puget Sound Restoration Fund. The program will engage and train professional and volunteer diver networks, expand monitoring platforms and deploy robotic systems to keep "eyes on kelp" and accumulate important data that leads to better protective measures for this critical and vanishing ecosystem.

Operation Pangolin launched in Cameroon and Gabon to generate much-needed data to inform conservation strategies in Central Africa. The team, led by Florida International University, will develop monitoring and data collection toolkits that will be distributed to local researchers and conservation stakeholders to deploy. The main threat to Pangolin populations in both Africa and Asia is poaching for international wildlife trafficking. Enough pangolin scales have been seized in the past decade to account for at least 1 million pangolins, yet little is known about the trafficking supply chains. The project is being supported by four academic institutions, the Zoological Society of London and a global network of 189 pangolin technical specialists.

Canada lynx habitat in Washington state has increasingly burned in wildfires over the past 20 years, and there is concern that the remaining habitat will be destroyed before the previously burned habitat can regrow. The foundation's investment will help biologists learn more about how lynx are adapting to and responding to disturbances to their current habitats, and how we can respond to ensure their future in the North Cascades.

We are funding an aerial wildlife survey that will count elephants and other wildlife in the five KAZA countries; Angola, Botswana, Namibia, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. The data will inform regionally integrated approaches aimed towards harmonizing policies, strategies, and practices for managing the shared natural resources that straddle the international borders of the KAZA partner states. In addition to the aerial survey, we support efforts to modernize wildlife surveys through machine learning and assist the International Union of Conservation of Nature (IUCN) with the development of a new African Elephant Status Report. We are also piloting a year-long community development project to educate and activate communities around the benefits of wildlife and best practices for harmonious co-existence.

Coral reef research is essential in our race against time to increase coral heat tolerance and find new ways to restore degraded reefs. We support coral research projects that elevate a range of resilience, adaptation, and conservation efforts. Grants include supporting researchers' efforts to boost genetic diversity, assist thermal tolerance, study and improve restoration techniques, and understand coral heat resilience.

The foundation funded a network of experts in the science and policy arena to leverage current research and data and convince global decision-makers at the Convention on International Trade of Endangered Species' (CITES) CoP19 to give a range of shark species Appendix II status, resulting in better protection for almost 90% of all shark species.

Oceans 5 comprises 22 funding organizations with a common inspiration for grantmaking that delivers tangible improvement in global ocean health, establishes marine reserves, and constrains overfishing.