President’s Letter: The Long Game

The conservation of nature never stops. Workloads exceed waking hours in a day. Our best-laid plans continue to be challenged by shape-shifting institutions and circumstances around the world.

While change may increasingly define the world in which we work, our mission, our vision, and our direction of travel remain constant: to conserve and sustain the nature upon which all life on Earth depends. Which is why we’re obsessed with durability and resilience—not just for the landscapes and seascapes where we work, but also in the lives of the communities who call those places home.

At our best, we are able to conjure initiatives that consider the throughline of time and construct solutions compelling enough and clever enough, with deep-enough roots and ownership to last through changes in political leadership and the world economic order.

In this issue, the magazine highlights two such paths to durability.

The first tells the story of Bhutan for Life, a groundbreaking agreement matching a long-term, performance-based financial mechanism with the leadership and commitment of a small but visionary country. Bhutan for Life permanently protects the nation’s 5 million-acre network of protected areas, and more than half of the nation is now under conservation protection. Nine years ago, Bhutan’s Prime Minister Tshering Tobgay took the main stage of TED Global. In the allotted 18 minutes, he took us from the soul of his homeland to its distinction as the only carbon-negative country in the world. Then he described our joint creation of Bhutan for Life and dreamed of applying that model of durability across the world.

Prime Minister Tobgay’s dream came true in 2021 in the form of Enduring Earth, a sweeping collaboration anchored by four founders: WWF, The Nature Conservancy, The Pew Charitable Trusts, and ZOMALAB—with more than 100 partners working on 16 projects across 15 countries. The goal of Enduring Earth is to durably conserve nearly 1.5 billion acres of land, ocean, and freshwater using the Project Finance for Permanence, or PFP, approach. In just a few short years, through the leadership of local partners, Enduring Earth has added over 500 million acres to the total area protected by PFP initiatives like Bhutan for Life—more than double the area of the previous 15 years.

The second story introduces you to Sowing Change, WWF’s partnership with the global development organization CARE. It makes a bet on the vision, the leadership, and the strength of women, and supports their efforts through training, technical support, and financial opportunity. Sowing Change is a livelihood-to-leadership initiative in which women lead their communities in identifying local solutions to climate challenges. As water gatherers, food producers, and stewards of natural resources, women have intimate insight into the real effects of a changing climate. Including them in resource decisions ensures sustainable solutions that will work now and help their families adapt as circumstances change.

Sowing Change hits the ground in southern Kenya, near the border of Tanzania, where WWF’s and CARE’s Kenya offices work together to support women and their communities in starting nature-based enterprises like beekeeping and goat farming. The program launched in Colombia in February and will launch in Zambia later this year.

Durability—in communities, in work, in life—is hard won. It takes resilience, it takes courage, it takes collaboration, and it takes a force of will. It depends upon people who don’t just think about the here and now, but who look through time and imagine solutions that last.

Successful conservation depends on playing the long game, and at WWF, we seek durability in all that we do.

Carter Roberts

President and CEO