A year after the shuttering of USAID conservation projects fight to stay afloat
Release Date: 03/24/2026
The Indigenous Desert Alliance is restoring biodiversity across the Australian desert
Mongabay Newscast
This week on the Mongabay Newscast, Samantha Murray, CEO of the joins the program to discuss the IDA’s recent nomination for an . The alliance is a network of 70 ranger teams across the Australian desert, covering 270 million hectares (667 million acres), an area almost as large as Argentina. This makes it the largest Indigenous-led conservation corridor on the planet. Murray and her network of 885 rangers have helped restore biodiversity to 140 million hectares (346 million acres) of land over the past four years using the practice of cultural burning, a cultural and ecological management...
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The exotic pet trade fuels biodiversity and disease risks. Here’s how to curb it
Mongabay Newscast
The global pet trade, particularly in exotic reptiles and amphibians, poses significant biodiversity and potential human health risks, scientists say; yet compared to other pressing crises like climate change, the solutions are relatively simple — if only governments would act on them. Susan Lieberman, vice president for international policy at the Wildlife Conservation Society, based in the U.S., and Sandra Altherr, co-founder and head of science at Pro Wildlife, in Germany, join the Mongabay Newscast this week to discuss these solutions, which they’ve outlined in a published in the...
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Kynan Tegar wants ‘a future that exists’ for Indonesia’s Indigenous communities
Mongabay Newscast
Indigenous activist and filmmaker joins the Mongabay Newscast this week to discuss the impacts of the fires devastating Kalimantan, the Indonesian portion of the island of Borneo. Some 48,000 hectares (about 119,000 acres) of land have burned so far this year; Kynan says these fires are intentional on the part of agricultural corporations. “The process that has gotten us to this point right now, where fires are raging through the island, it’s a process that started maybe you can draw the line up to the 1970s, which was around the time where the Indonesian New Order period regime of...
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Iwi and communities bring kiwi back to Wellington after 150 years
Mongabay Newscast
For the first time in 150 years, kiwi once again live in the hills surrounding Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand. More than 250 manu (“birds” in the Māori language) were successfully translocated back to the region, thanks to the efforts of the iwi (nations of Aotearoa), community members, and landowners behind the . Paul Ward, the project lead and founder, joins the Mongabay Newscast this week to explain the yearslong effort to make this possible. “This is a relational project as much as it is what you might traditionally call a conservation project. And I think at a fundamental level...
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Home Planet Fund succeeds in conservation by investing in local knowledge
Mongabay Newscast
This week on the Newscast, we’re joined by Dilafruz Khonikboyeva, the founder of the an independent, Indigenous-led nonprofit that provides funding for local and Indigenous communities and conservation projects around the world. Khonikboyeva, who is also the organization’s executive director, speaks about the ethos of the Home Planet Fund and how it works. But I must emphasize that in my conversation with Khonikboyeva, what stands out most to me isn’t just the fund’s focus on Indigenous-led conversation and investing in local knowledge. It’s the well of experience Khonikboyeva...
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Mongabay Newscast
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A health crisis for Peru’s recently contacted people brings planetary health to the fore
Mongabay Newscast
Mongabay staff writer Aimee Gabay joins the Newscast this week to discuss her reporting trip to the Peruvian Amazon, where she with the Indigenous Matsés community. She made the trip initially to examine environmental threats to Matsés territory. Instead, she found them suffering from an epidemic of malaria and hepatitis B, which they have been asking the Peruvian government to help address. “The story itself was a surprise … every question directed to them about environmental changes would immediately become an issue about health,” Gabay says. The current epidemic of malaria and...
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Christiana Figueres and Garik Israelian on Jane Goodall’s legacy and the search for truth
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In Bhutan, the pursuit of happiness extends to the food system
Mongabay Newscast
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‘Remembering Wildlife’ before it goes extinct
Mongabay Newscast
British wildlife photographer Margot Raggett says she created the book after she heard David Attenborough say, “The question is, are we happy to suppose that our grandchildren may never be able to see an elephant except in a picture book?" Her effort was to provoke this question in others and to give the proceeds from its sale to conservation organizations. In a sense, the book went viral and generated a following, prompting Raggett to continue the book series and her nonprofit, . “Sometimes people get upset with me and say ‘They're still around,’ but I want people to stop and...
info_outlineWhen then-U.S. president John F . Kennedy created the United States Agency for International Development in 1961, it was meant primarily to administer health and food aid around the world. In the decades since, USAID expanded to become one of the world's largest financial contributors to conservation, providing nearly $400 million annually before the end of 2024.
However, that money is now completely gone after the current president, Donald Trump, gutted and shut down the agency in one of his first acts upon returning to office in January 2025. Since then, an estimated 834,000 people have lost their lives as a result of the ending of health programs, two-thirds of them likely children, according to an analysis from Impact Counter. Much of the agency’s health focus was on HIV/AIDS treatment and prevention.
“Support for HIV/AIDS treatment, malaria control and other initiatives have saved an estimated 91 million lives just over the past 20 years,” says environmental reporter Michelle Nijhuis.
Nijhuis, who joins Mongabay’s podcast this week, says it’s a similar story on the conservation front, with projects around the world suddenly losing their main — and in many cases their only — source of funding.
She notes that “$400 million [was] going toward really creative … successful conservation projects in some of the most endangered habitats in the world [that] were also stopped abruptly.”
The impact is being felt in places and communities that relied on this funding, such as Ethiopia, the Congo Basin, the Amazon and Indonesia. Also affected are many of the world’s largest conservation NGOs, some of which received tens of millions of dollars from USAID annually. The long-term damage from this, Nijhuis says, is very difficult to measure.
“Some of the effects we're already seeing, but some of the effects are going to be much slower to appear, much harder to measure,” she says, “and in many ways we will not know what we've lost.”
Michell Nijhuis is also the author of the recent book Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction.
Initiatives mentioned by Nijhuis:
Reimagining Conservation Project
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Mike DiGirolamo is the host & producer for the Mongabay Newscast based in Sydney. Find him on LinkedIn and Bluesky.
Image Credit: The WeMUNIZE program in Nigeria, significantly disrupted by aid cuts, used digital record keeping and community engagement to increase early childhood immunizations. Image by KC Nwakalor for USAID/Digital Development Communications via Flickr (CC BY 2.0).
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Timecodes
(00:00) How USAID funded conservation
(05:10) Human health and conservation fallout after USAID shuts down
(13:52) Large NGOs feel the impact
(21:39) ‘We will not know what we lost’
(31:45) How conservation groups are surviving
(37:34) The bright spots