$200 million new funding: Jeff Bezos, Lauren Sánchez, Leonardo DiCaprio, Wes Sechrest, Dax Dasilva and Todd Graves unite to save 100 species from extinction

The world’s most ambitious species-rescue effort just got its financial backbone, and it arrived through an unlikely partnership between a Hollywood actor’s conservation nonprofit and the philanthropic vehicle of the world’s second-richest man.

The Bezos Earth Fund and Re:wild announced a combined $200 million commitment to launch the Phoenix Species Project, an initiative both organizations are calling the largest single philanthropic fund in history dedicated exclusively to pulling critically endangered species back from the edge of extinction. The math behind the headline number is straightforward and deliberately balanced: $100 million from the Bezos Earth Fund, matched by $100 million raised through Re:wild with support from Leonardo DiCaprio personally, the Vancouver-based nonprofit Age of Union, and the Todd Graves Family Foundation, the philanthropic arm founded by the Raising Cane’s chicken chain billionaire.

The origin story is a slow burn rather than a sudden inspiration. Back in 2021, DiCaprio and Re:wild co-founder Wes Sechrest sat down with Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez Bezos, a meeting that unspooled into years of follow-on conversations with local governments, environmental groups, and Indigenous communities about how to actually reverse species decline rather than just slow it down.

That patience shows up in the design of the fund itself. Rather than scattering grants in the usual one-or-two-year cycles that conservationists have long complained leave projects gasping for renewal, the Phoenix Species Project is structured to give each of its 100 target species roughly five years of sustained backing, according to Re:wild’s Barney Long. It’s a philosophical bet as much as a financial one: that species reduced to a few hundred or even a few dozen individuals can still rebound if the money and the will show up for long enough to matter.

The list of animals, plants, and fungi in line for help reads like a fever dream of biodiversity’s strangest and most overlooked corners.

There’s the golden-crowned sifaka, a lemur clinging to Madagascar’s northern forests; the Hickory Nut Gorge green salamander, a lungless tree-dweller found in exactly one canyon in the Appalachian foothills of North Carolina; the Visayan warty pig, endemic to a handful of Philippine islands; the pink land iguana, which exists only on the slopes of Wolf Volcano in the Galápagos; and Attenborough’s long-beaked echidna, an egg-laying mammal from New Guinea named for the naturalist who turns 100 this year.

The Bezos Earth Fund’s own release adds the bowmouth guitarfish, whose fins are prized in the illegal fin trade, and a tiny, honey-scented desert succulent from South Africa poached for the ornamental plant market. Altogether the project spans 30 countries and every major taxonomic group, from mammals and birds down to amphibians, fish, invertebrates, and plants.

Money alone doesn’t save a species, so the project leans heavily on people who already know the terrain. More than 100 local and international partner organizations will carry out the actual recovery work, from conservation breeding and habitat restoration to disease management and the removal of invasive predators, with the IUCN Species Survival Commission signed on as a scientific backstop to keep the whole portfolio rigorous.

Tiana Andriamanana, executive director of Association Fanamby, the Madagascar-based group tasked with the golden-crowned sifaka, put the frustration of underfunded conservation bluntly: “We’ve protected the golden-crowned sifaka for years on a budget that would never match what this species deserves, but letting it go extinct was never an option,” adding that “this funding, this global platform and technical support change what is possible”.

DiCaprio, who has spent nearly two decades building Re:wild into one of the more muscular players in global conservation finance, framed the launch in sweeping terms. “For decades, scientists, Indigenous Peoples, local communities, and conservation leaders have been on the front lines of protecting nature, and what has been made clear through research, is that species on the brink of extinction are often the ones that anchor some of the world’s most important ecosystems,” he said in the joint announcement, arguing that protecting a single vanishing species often means protecting the forest, wetland, or reef it depends on.

Sechrest, who now serves as Re:wild’s CEO, tied the effort back to something closer to self-interest than sentimentality, noting that “we all depend on the fabric of life on our planet, for everything from our food, fuel, and medicines, to clean water and air,” and that the fund exists to prove tiny, embattled populations “can recover” when the right people and resources finally arrive.

The scale of the crisis the project is aimed at is sobering.

Of nearly 176,000 species assessed on the IUCN Red List, more than 31,000 are classified as critically endangered, endangered, or already extinct in the wild. Against that backdrop, $200 million and 100 species is a fraction of the need, and both organizations seem aware of it.

The stated ambition isn’t just to save the animals on the list but to turn the Phoenix Species Project into what DiCaprio called “a global movement that inspires others to invest in nature,” an open invitation for other billionaires, foundations, and governments to buy into a model built around patience rather than press-release-friendly one-off grants.

For the Bezos Earth Fund, this is another installment in the $10 billion pledge Jeff Bezos made in 2020, a commitment that has now produced 41 grants totaling roughly $591 million toward nature restoration and conservation, according to the fund’s own accounting, run day to day by president and CEO Tom Taylor under Bezos as chairman and Lauren Sánchez Bezos as vice chair.

For Re:wild and DiCaprio, it builds on a partnership history that already includes a $200 million pledge toward protecting the Brazilian Amazon and a newer alliance with Age of Union targeting Madagascar’s biodiversity crisis, suggesting this latest commitment is less a one-time headline than the next chapter in a fairly consistent, if quietly expanding, philanthropic partnership between the two camps.