Program Overview and Goals

A healthy natural environment provides us with the resources needed to sustain life—from food and clean water, to medicines and raw materials. It also maintains global biodiversity and the productivity and resilience of ecological systems.  However, in many places around the globe this natural capital is being spent faster than it can be renewed.

Our goal is to change the ways in which people use terrestrial, freshwater, and coastal marine ecosystems to conserve critical ecological systems and functions, while allowing sustainable use.  

Initiatives and Standalone Grants

We focus our efforts on long-term support of a small number of initiatives and standalone grants that pursue measurable conservation outcomes on a broad scale.

The goals are:

• Andes-Amazon Initiative: to maintain the climatic function and biodiversity of the Amazon Basin by promoting forest conservation and addressing the drivers of deforestation and forest degradation.  
• Marine Conservation Initiative: to achieve healthy marine ecosystems in North America that support sustainable use. 
• Wild Salmon Ecosystems Initiative: to maintain a healthy salmon ecosystem at the scale of the North Pacific. 
• Conservation International: to develop new programs that improve and further sustain today’s global environment and human well-being.  
• Environmental Conservation Standalone Grants: to support and develop conservation-based tools, methods, and new knowledge.