U.S President Donald Trump and his senior adviser, tech billionaire Elon Musk, recently imposed a 90-day freeze on nearly all USAID projects. USAID is known for funding health and humanitarian projects globally. And as Mongabay’s Ashoka Mukpo reports, the agency also provides significant support for conservation projects, which are now reeling with uncertainty after some of their funding dried up overnight.
Of the U.S. government’s $60 billion nonmilitary foreign aid budget in 2023, approximately $375 million went to biodiversity projects. USAID directed much of those funds toward activities like ranger patrols for wildlife security, habitat restoration, and community conservation efforts.
Since USAID’s establishment in 1961, its nature conservation funding has enjoyed bipartisan support, with many conservation organizations globally depending on it. Disruption of that funding has left many groups scrambling to plug the gap.
For example, on the Indonesian island of Sumatra, U.S. foreign aid supports monitoring for critically endangered species including rhinos, tiger, orangutans and elephants.
“The biggest impact is on patrols because most of our patrol teams are funded by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service,” Goldman Prize winner Rudi Putra with the Leuser Conservation Forum in Sumatra told Mongabay. “This funding supports orangutans, rhinos and elephants, so with the funding cut, our patrol teams have been reduced.”
In the Democratic Republic of Congo, USAID money was used to monitor and protect habitat for roughly one-third of the world’s remaining mountain gorillas (Gorilla beringei beringei) in Virunga National Park.
Matthew Hansen, a remote-sensing scientist with the University of Maryland, U.S., has been working with local authorities in the Congo Basin to map their forests, including Virunga, so they could be paid for keeping the critical habitat intact.
“We just had the plug pulled on us, and we don’t have a plan right now,” Hansen told Mongabay.
Several community-based conservation groups in Africa abruptly lost funding that was supporting their members.
In Kenya, USAID was expected to provide nearly $13 million this year for nature conservation projects, Dickson Kaelo, head of the Kenya Wildlife Conservancies Association, told Mongabay. Without that funding, Kaelo said he fears communities could shift toward agriculture and other forms of land use rather than conservation.
“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.
This is a summary of “Across the world, conservation projects reel after abrupt US funding cuts” by Ashoka Mukpo for Mongabay.
Banner image: A mountain gorilla in the North Kivu region of Virunga National Park. Image by Joseph King via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).
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