Phoenix Species Project

The Phoenix Species Project is the largest fund in history dedicated exclusively to recovering Critically Endangered species across taxa, ecosystems and countries. Photo Courtesy of Fanamby.

Where recovery becomes reality

The Phoenix Species Project is a global effort to recover 100 of the world’s most threatened species by providing sustained support for the local champions with the experience and knowledge to lead their recovery.

The project begins with a $200 million commitment, with $100 million from Leonardo DiCaprio’s Re:wild and $100 million from the Bezos Earth Fund, with support from Leonardo DiCaprio, Age of Union, and the Todd Graves Family Foundation. The project’s 100 species span mammals, amphibians, reptiles, birds, fish, invertebrates, and plants from 30 countries that live across a range of habitats, from oceans to freshwater lakes, tropical rainforests to volcanic plains

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How the Phoenix Species Project was born

For decades, Leonardo DiCaprio has been working at the center of global environmental issues, partnering with community-based organizations, governments and Indigenous Peoples to combat the climate crisis and safeguard our wildlife. His organization Re:wild works with over 600 partners in more than 80 countries to help protect more than 35,000 species and half a billion acres of the wild and over the years, it has become clear that species on the brink of extinction are often the very ones that anchor some of the world’s most important ecosystems.

In the spring of 2021, DiCaprio brought Re:wild co-founder Dr. Wes Sechrest with him to meet with Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez Bezos, vice chair of the Bezos Earth Fund. The conversation centered around an idea DiCaprio had been developing for years: addressing one of the most critical yet underfunded and overlooked solutions to the climate crisis – protecting endangered species and their habitats.

Months later, in the fall of 2021, Re:wild, Bezos Earth Fund, and nine other conservation philanthropies launched the Protecting Our Planet (POP) Challenge, focused on protecting at least 30% of the most important land, freshwater, and marine area on the planet. In the years since, DiCaprio continued conversations around how to evolve this into an even more ambitious challenge, protecting the most at-risk species by reimagining what their recovery could look like with the funding and scale this crisis demands.

Building on the momentum of The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodversity Framework, the landmark global agreement adopted by nearly every country to stop and reverse biodiversity loss by 2050, Re:wild consulted local partners around the world to understand what it would take to dramatically scale up the recovery of endangered species, and what they could achieve with the funding needed to make significant change.

Those conversations led to the creation of the Phoenix Species Project, designed and developed by Re:wild and Bezos Earth Fund, with additional funding support from DiCaprio, Age of Union, and the Todd Graves Family Foundation, and technical support from the IUCN Species Survival Commission and the Reverse the Red Action Partnership.

Re:wild has continuously worked alongside local partners to develop proven approaches to prevent extinctions and recover species. For decades, DiCaprio and Re:wild have been exploring with local partners what it would take to launch and deliver a true moonshot to recover Critically Endangered and Endangered species across the planet.

That long-standing ambition, combined with the conversation that began in 2021, has now become the Phoenix Species Project, with more than 100 local communities and Indigenous Peoples, conservationists and governments leading the work in the places the project’s focal species call home.

Re:wild and Bezos Earth Fund invite others to join them in providing the catalytic investment needed to ensure endangered species recover, ecosystems thrive, and life on Earth persists.