Protects endangered wildlife and their threatened habitats by providing emergency assistance and long-term support to parks, nature reserves and anti-poaching activities on five continents.
Why do we exist?
The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) is dedicated to protecting the world's wildlife and wildlands. The largest privately supported international conservation organization in the world, WWF has sponsored more than 2,000 projects in 116 countries and has more than 1 million members in the U.S. alone.
WWF directs its conservation efforts toward three global goals: protecting endangered spaces, saving endangered species, and addressing global threats. From working to save the giant panda, tiger, and rhino to helping establish and manage parks and reserves worldwide, WWF has been a conservation leader since 1961.
What have you accomplished?
The WWF network's history and scope are exemplified by the more than 3,200 projects it has aided in nearly 150 countries. But WWF's legacy goes beyond these simple numbers. WWF often works with its project grantees for several years (in some cases, for a decade or more) to ensure that local conservation capability is carefully built to last or to gain results available only through long-term efforts. Furthermore, WWF projects have frequently triggered additional initiatives and support from other sources that have led to greater conservation achievements.
Perhaps WWF's largest contribution has been in establishing and aiding some 430 national parks and nature reserves, approximately two-thirds of these in Latin America. WWF has been instrumental in assisting several of the most important parks in Central and South America, including Darien Frontier National Park (Panama), Corcovado National Park and Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve (Costa Rica), Rio Platano Biosphere Reserve (Honduras), La Planada Nature Reserve (Colombia), and Manu National Park (Peru). WWF has worked with the National Park Service of Costa Rica since its inception in 1974; today the country has what is arguably the best national park system in the world. In Asia, parks or reserves supported by WWF include Annapurna Conservation Area (Nepal), Manas (Bhutan), and St. Paul and El Nido (the Philippines).
WWF has always sought to develop and strengthen local knowledge and support of conservation needs. Conservation education and training programs developed and supported by WWF have had an especially important impact in Latin America and the Caribbean. Literally thousands of school teachers and ministries of education in seven countries are formally using environmental education curriculum materials developed by WWF and adapted to local needs. At the regional level, WWF has helped to initiate five major wildlife and parks management training centers at universities in Central America, the Andean Region, Brazil, the Caribbean, and East Africa. In 1994, nearly 600 individuals throughout Asia, Africa, Latin America, Eastern Europe, and the United States benefited from WWF capacity-building activities.
WWF staff has contributed to the negotiation and implementation of several international wildlife treaties and laws. Examples include CITES (the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora), the US-USSR Migratory Bird Treaty, the World Heritage Convention, and the U.S. Endangered Species Act.
Since 1974, WWF has annually awarded the $50,000 Getty Prize (increased to $100,000 in 1999) for outstanding contributions to wildlife conservation. The prize, which was established by the late J. Paul Getty and is now sponsored by his son Gordon Getty, has been awarded to 18 eminent conservation leaders and to 11 nongovernmental organizations in 20 countries.
In a 1984 New York Times editorial, Dr. Thomas E. Lovejoy, then vice president of World Wildlife Fund, first set forth the concept of using Third World debt reduction to protect the global environment. Through debt-for-nature swaps, WWF is working to convert portions of tropical nations' debts into funding for conservation. WWF has completed 19 such agreements involving more than $58 million in face-value debt that have been used to bolster local capabilities in Latin America, Africa and Asia.
|
