The struggle to protect wildlife around the world as Trump's aid cuts start to bite

Independent

3 days ago

Zambia's Lower Zambeezi National Park faced more than its fair share of problems since it first opened in 1983. Lying next to porous borders with Mozambique and Zimbabwe, the park – which spans more than 1,000 square miles – became a hub for illegal activities such as trophy poaching, bushmeat poaching, illegal mining of gold, and unregulated fishing along the Zambezi River.
With cases of human- wildlife conflict rising, and gunshots heard across the park most nights, in 1994 groups including safari operators and local communities around the park established the charity Conservation Lower Zambezi (CLZ) to help government authorities protect the The Lower Zambezi National Park, which is home to an abundance of wildlife including lions, leopards, more than 400 different kinds of bird species, and numerous other endangered species.
Today, CLZ has a team of 100 who work 365 days a year to protect the park. More than half of those employees are community scouts from the local communities that work alongside government rangers on patrols of up to two weeks at a time, following tracks or tip-offs as part of regular, canine, aerial, or marine units. Whether it's by sniffing out bushmeat from the villages that surround the park, removing poachers snares, or scouting out signs of illegal mining, CLZ's work ensures the park is both a safe haven for wildlife, and a key economic asset for Zambia.
But decades of hard-won progress is now under direct threat from cuts to US overseas aid. Specifically, frozen financing from the US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) has left a $900,000 (£680,000) hole in CLZ's finances over the next four years. The past few months have left the charity 'scrambling' to fill gaps where they can, says fundraising manager Frances Hannah, including by cutting the number of patrols that it carries out and reducing activities in other programme areas.
'Since the freeze came in January – we've been playing chess with our funding to cover gaps where we can' says Hannah. 'The walls are closing in, and I don't think anyone wants to discuss what kind of cuts we may have to make next, because it is not going to be good.'
The Lower Zambezi National Park is only a safe haven for wildlife because of the 'support to the government and the constant surveillance' that CLZ and Rangers are able to carry out, Hannah continues. But the threats to the park remain fundamentally the same as when it opened: 'If you suddenly can't be putting out 10 patrol teams a week, and you're only putting out six, then there are going to be areas that are going to suffer,' she says.
CLZ's story is far from unique. Analysis of leaked USAID files analysed by The Independent show that biodiversity-supporting, multi-year grants in Africa worth more than $300 million were cancelled after contract terminations were confirmed in March - and that's not even taking into account other conservation grants from agencies like USFWS and the State Department, which have also been ravaged.
Numerous organisations spoken to by The Independent, many of whom are continuing to do so anonymously over fear of possible reprisals from the US government, have described the devastating impacts that these cuts have had over the past six months. Their stories reveal the tenacity of aid workers in their drive to keep programmes going ever since the first 'stop work' order on all foreign assistance was first issued by the Trump Administration on January 24 - and also reveal the very real impacts that aid cuts have had on global efforts to protect and restore the world's wild places.,
One conservation worker at a National Park in the Eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, for example, described how the park lost a grant worth north of $5m 'functionally overnight'. Meanwhile, Charlie Mayhew, founder and CEO of British Conservation charity Tusk, told The Independent that a total of 40 Tusk project partners lost a total of $29.5m in funding.
'They're all having to make immediate savings and quite drastic cost-cutting exercises,' says Mayhew. 'Rural communities are being devastated by job redundancies, with one employed individual likely to be supporting up to 10 family members.'
Christof Schenck, Executive Director of the Frankfurt Zoological Society (FZS), is similarly reeling from major cuts to his own organisation's finances. The FZS is one of the world's most active conservation organisations, with an annual budget of around $50m and operations in 18 countries, termination of FZS's USAID grant creates a $4.5m budget hole between now and 2027, while termination of its USFWS grant leaves another $4m gap between now and 2029.
'We have worked very well with US aid agencies for many years, and we were always impressed by how effective their conservation programs have been,' says Schenck. 'We understand that aid could be more efficient, and more impact-orientated, but the current approach is hurting many successful projects, and we are very worried about the cuts.'
FZS carries out crucial conservation efforts in a number of countries, including law enforcement, surveillance of highly endangered species, and managing human-wildlife conflict. While the charity has so far made some employees redundant, and cut some programmes, it is largely sustaining itself by tapping into reserves that the charity has amassed over many years. They know that they will not be able to keep doing this indefinitely, but simply terminating conservation work is not really an option: 'We can't just stop now and leave, for example, black rhino populations or elephants without any protection,' says Schenck.
US government funding represented a particularly vital lifeline for conservation programmes in Africa because it is both a region of the world, and sector, that struggles to attract required levels of investment.
The UN estimates that $200bn per year is needed globally to halt and reverse biodiversity loss - but only $154bn is currently mobilised. Africa, in particular, only receives around three per cent of global biodiversity finance, despite hosting nearly 30 per cent of the world's biodiversity and nearly 20 per cent of global forest cover.
But while US money might have been crucial for African conservation programmes, for the aid agencies themselves, the money was a drop in the ocean. The $375.4m that USAID provided to biodiversity projects in 2023, according to information submitted to Congress last December, represented just 0.6 per cent of the agency's $60bn overall budget. Meanwhile, the roughly $50m that was directed to USFWS's key international programme streams represented around one per cent of that agency's overall budget.
Conservationists spoken to by The Independent are at pains to stress that the impact of cuts reaches far beyond just the animals. Firstly, there's the loss of vital jobs and investment, and the programmes enabling rural people to have a better quality of life . When you factor in the impact of aid cuts to non-wildlife-focused programmes in rural areas, which will leave people more likely to exploit the natural environment to survive, the crisis is clear.
William Peshut, from the The Maasai Mara Wildlife Conservancies Association (MMWCA) in Kenya, is a man who understands that first point very well. In Kenya, only around 10 per cent of the country's landmass are technically legally 'protected' - but a further 16 per cent of the country is categorised as wildlife 'conservancies', which are areas managed by rural herders and farmers, where they have learnt to coexist with wild animals including elephants, giraffes and buffalo.
MMWCA plays a vital role in overseeing 25 conservancies spread around the Maasai Mara National Park, which together cover some 700 square miles of land. Key to doing this is supporting communities so that they feel willing to live alongside wildlife, whether through educational programmes to deter human-wildlife conflict or by encouraging gender parity in conservation work, as well as by the employment of rangers in the conservancies, and the lobbying of the Kenyan government for greater legislative support.
'It's all about helping communities co-exist with the natural landscape, and also helping them generate as much income as possible from conservation work,' says Peshut, who adds that the work has been so successful that wildlife numbers are actually higher in the conservancies than in many parts of the park.
MMWCA is now facing a major funding gap, with Peshut revealing that a USAID grant running between 2024 and 2028, which was worth $6.5m dollars, has been cancelled, with that total representing 72 per cent of MMWCA's budget. The charity has been making do on reserves from previously-allocated grants so far - but already programmes are being reorganised and plans are being put on hold, including a plan to establish a major new wildlife corridor to the east of the park, which has now been cancelled.
Kaddu Sebunya, CEO at the African Wildlife Foundation, a Nairobi-based international conservation charity working across 17 African countries, details how he believes that aid cuts to non-wildlife-focused programmes are also having a major impact on wildlife conservation efforts.
'Aid cuts to health programmes, agricultural programmes, or generally any rural development programmes are going to lead people to depend more on natural resources in the area, which will lead to deforestation, and greater competition between agriculture and habitats,' he says.
'Already, more than 70 per cent of Africans depend on agriculture as a main source of income, and over 70 per cent depend on wood for their energy,' Sebunya continues. 'Those percentages are both going to increase as aid cuts push people out of stable work and healthcare programmes, and that is a major worry for us.'
Cuts to healthcare programmes is having very real impacts on conservation programmes in other ways too: One conservation charity told The Independent that in Southern Africa several conservation programmes had reported concerns that 'quite a lot of staff' were on antiretroviral medication for HIV that have now been cut, creating new challenges around staffing ranger programmes.
Sebunya - whose own organisation lost the equivalent of 15 per cent of its annual budget to US overseas aid cuts - sees the problem facing conservation programmes right now as not just just stemming from the decisions of the Trump administration, but also from a long-term failure of the African governments to develop sustainable business models around conservation.
'We have not tied our conservation work to the economic aspirations of Africans, but instead only tied it to cultural aspects of Africans,' he says. 'This means that our sector has always been funded by foreign NGOs and foreign governments.' It leads to a situation such as has happened in Kenya, Sebunya continues, where the government there has increased the health and education budgets, but not the conservation budget.
'It's a failure on our part that we have not been able to prove that if conservation does not succeed, it is a sustainability issue, it is a health issue, and it is a rural economy issue,' he says. 'And if it is a rural economy issue it becomes an urban economy issue, because rural people will then come to the cities.'
The good news, believes Sebunya, is that whenever there is a crisis such as now, there is an opportunity to change the narrative - and already there are striking stories of organisations looking to adapt to the new status quo.
In Kenya, Peshut says that MMWCA is currently in negotiations with the local government for 10 per cent of entrance fees charged at the gate of the national park to be placed in a 'Wildlife Conservancies Fund', in order to support the activities of the charity. MMWCA is also negotiating with landowners in the conservancies for greater financial contribution to MMWCA's activities, while negotiations are also ongoing for the local government to offer its own direct financial support to MMWCA.
'The future is not going to be easy, but we are doing all we can to boost our own fundraising efforts before our grant financing runs out,' Peshut says. 'What we do know is we absolutely cannot stop our activities in the conservancies, as that would be a total disaster.'
But while organisations will naturally look to remain optimistic, and seek alternative routes forward where they can, there is no denying the gravity of what has befallen conservation groups this year.
'In my more than 40 years in conservation, I have never known anything like this: One contract party cutting off millions of dollars of funding practically overnight,' says FZS's Schenck. 'Now, a time window is closing for us and other organisations, and the crisis gets deeper by day.'
He adds: 'While our politicians might be increasingly reluctant to do so, we continue to see a responsibility from the Global North to support conservation. We have much more money, with economies built on fossil fuels, and therefore owe it to them to help.'