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 important terrestrial and coastal marine ecosystems are used to conserve critical ecological systems and functions, such as the climate function of the Andes-Amazon rainforest, for future generations, while allowing current uses to be sustained. 

Initiatives and Commitments

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

The goals and measurement standards are:

• Andes-Amazon Initiative: preserve the climatological function and representative biodiversity of the Andes-Amazon region, as measured by the extent and distribution of forest canopy cover under effective and sustainable land use management
• Marine Conservation Initiative: establish resilient and productive coastal marine ecosystems managed sustainably for current and future generations, using comprehensive area-based management and improved fisheries management, as measured by the extent that habitat important for ecosystem processes is intact and trophic interactions of the ecosystem are maintained
• Wild Salmon Ecosystems Initiative: maintain the functioning of a healthy salmon ecosystem at the scale of the North Pacific Ocean including adjacent rivers and watersheds, as measured by the abundance and biological diversity of wild North Pacific salmon
• Conservation International Commitment: conserve Earth’s living natural heritage—global biodiversity—and to demonstrate that human societies are able to live harmoniously with nature, as measured by a comprehensive set of biodiversity conservation outcomes in the world’s hotspots and important wilderness areas
• Environment Conservation Special Projects:  support and develop conservation-based tools, methods and new knowledge.