The following statement was released today by WCS President and CEO Cristián Samper upon the announcement of the new groundbreaking “Protecting Our Planet Challenge” and its $5 billion commitment toward protecting and conserving 30 percent of the planet by 2030

The European Union will support WCS’s Five Great Forests initiative, a successful collaboration to protect Mesoamerica’s five largest forests—the last remaining intact forests from Mexico to Colombia critical to the region’s people, culture, biodiversity, economic health, and resilience to climate change.

WCS EU welcomes today’s announcement of President von der Leyen that the European Union will double its external funding for biodiversity, in particular for the most vulnerable countries.

The following is a statement delivered by WCS President and CEO Cristián Samper at the Biodiversity PreCOP event hosted by the Government of Colombia here on August 30. The virtual event was held under the leadership of President Iván Duque Márquez. This event is a part of the Third Session of the Open-Ended Working Group on the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework (WG2020-3) negotiating sessions, from 23 August to 3 September 2021. Those participating...

A team of conservationists in Brazil funded by the Conservation Leadership Programme (CLP), of which WCS is a partner, has assisted in the creation and recent publication of a new government-executed management plan to conserve threatened coral reefs in Brazil’s largest federal coastal marine conservation unit, the Costa dos Corais.

A new study provides insight into where chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) avoided climate instability during glacial and interglacial periods in Africa over the past 120,000 years.

High Forest, Low Deforestation (HFLD) countries and jurisdictions are those with very extensive, ecologically intact forests and low past rates of deforestation.

Local communities in Tanzania’s Southern Highlands are involved in a forest restoration project aimed at protecting fresh water supplies, reforesting degraded areas and creating sustainable supplies of timber and fuelwood. 

A new study from WCS and WWF reveals that nearly 20 percent of tropical Intact Forest Landscapes (IFLs) overlap with concessions for extractive industries such as mining, oil and gas. The total area of overlap is 376,449 square miles (975,000 square kilometers), about the size of Egypt. Mining concessions overlap most with tropical IFLs, at 11.33 percent of the total area, while oil and gas concessions overlap with 7.85 percent of the total area.

Daniel J. Zarin has been named the Wildlife Conservation Society’s first Executive Director of Forests and Climate Change to lead the organization’s work emphasizing forests as a key nature-based solution to the climate crisis.