Top 10 Conservation Wins of the Century (So Far)

In this final episode of 2025 we’ll revisit iconic successes like the Paris Agreement on climate, the rebound of wild tigers and giant pandas, and the creation of the Amazon Region Protected Areas Program -- the largest tropical forest conservation initiative on Earth. Plus, we’ll celebrate grassroots efforts like Earth Hour and the return of bison to Native lands—proof that progress is happening at every level.

If you care about wildlife, climate, and sustainability, this episode will give you hope and inspiration for the future.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Seth Larson: Hey all, as the first quarter of the 20th century draws to a close, we're counting down 10 big conservation wins from the last 25 years.

Tune in to hear about the progress we've made on restoring wild tigers, conserving the Amazon rainforest and more. And if you're looking for charities to support during the year end giving rush, I hope you'll consider World Wildlife Fund. This podcast is free, but all the work you hear about in our episodes is made possible through the support of people like you.

Visit wwf.help/podcast if you can chip in. That's wwf.help/podcast. Thanks for listening.

Welcome to Nature Breaking, a podcast produced by World Wildlife Fund. As we near the end of 2025, I wanted to take some time in this episode to reflect back on the last quarter century of conservation wins. We hear all the time about the dire state of nature and the climate, and it's easy to feel like we're losing the fight to save our natural world.

But there have been some real accomplishments over the last 25 years that we at WWF and everyone who cares about nature can be proud of. From nearly doubling the number of wild tigers to establishing the world's largest tropical rainforest conservation program, we've seen plenty of innovative and impactful actions since the dawn of the millennium.

Today I am gonna count down Nature Breaking's top 10 conservation wins of the century so far. Before we get started, please take a moment to subscribe to our show wherever you're listening to this. Subscribing is free and easy and it helps ensure you'll never miss an episode.

So whether you like watching our episodes on YouTube, listening on Apple Podcasts, or Spotify or anywhere else, please subscribe. Thanks for listening, and here's today's episode.

Okay everyone, it's just me today. I usually feature a guest on this show, but for today's countdown style episode, I thought we'd mix it up and try something different. So since you'll be hearing from me a lot in this episode, what's my relationship to conservation in the 21st century so far? In the year 2000 when the century started, I was in high school. And I would not have considered myself an environmentalist back then. After high school and after college, I ended up working for a US senator who was and is an ardent environmentalist, and through my work for him, I really came to appreciate the importance of protecting the environment, acting on climate change, and on and on.

I ended up at WWF in 2017 and I've been devoting my career full-time to conservation since then. But all that said, I obviously don't have the most comprehensive lens through which to judge the biggest conservation wins since 2000. But thankfully I have a lot of colleagues who can help, and it's an amazing thing about WWF: people don't tend to leave.

We've got lots of employees who've worked here for 10, 15, 20, 30 years. And so I reached out to some of my colleagues who have the deepest institutional knowledge to help me build this list out. And I also talked to some of my colleagues on the media team who have tenures similar to mine, or a little bit longer, or a little bit shorter.

It's obviously a subjective thing; your mileage may vary on whether you agree with the list we came up with.

But we did our best to try to come up with a list that felt fair and interesting and hopefully fun to talk through.

So let's just put some rules of the road on the table first about this countdown. I toyed with the idea of ranking these accomplishments in order of importance. That's super subjective and out of respect to all my colleagues who might have a whole lot of different opinions about which things are more important than others, I decided that was not a good idea to try to go through. So we're going to count these down in reverse chronological order.

That means we'll start with the newest achievements and count backwards to the oldest. In instances where an achievement took place over a long period of time, that's pretty common in conservation, in those instances, I wanted to do my best to use the start date of the project or the initiative to assign its place in the order of the countdown. So if a project ran from 2012 to 2018, it'll be listed as a 2012 achievement for the purposes of our list today. I hope that makes sense. I'm gonna do my best to run through these and keep it light, keep it fun, but hopefully give you some information about some of the biggest achievements in conservation this century. Some of them may be familiar to you, some you may never have heard about. So I hope you learn something and I'd love to hear your feedback on whether you agree with this list or if we forgot something important. Shoot us an email at [email protected] and we'll keep an eye out for your thoughts and maybe share those on a future episode.

Okay, here we go. We're starting in the year 2025 with the High Seas Treaty going into effect. This happened just a few months ago, and it was a big win that was decades in the making. Governments and ocean advocates had been pushing for something like this for a long time, and in 2023, the treaty was adopted at a UN conference.

It then needed to be ratified by at least 60 countries before it could go into effect, and that officially happened in September 2025. So what does the High Seas Treaty do? Quite a few things, but the headline is that it creates a framework to establish marine protected areas in international waters.

This is a big deal because the majority of the ocean lies in those areas outside national jurisdiction, and up to now there was no agreed upon way to put formal conservation measures in place there.

Now there's still a number of countries that still need to ratify the treaty in order to ensure the strongest possible outcome, and I recently interviewed WWF's Johan Bergenas, and asked for his pitch about why those countries should do so, here's what he said.

Johan Bergenas: You don't have to do this out of the goodness of your heart, and you certainly shouldn't do it alone, but if you are interested in serving your people's needs for food, for energy, for breathing air, which the oceans have a major impact on, to harness all sorts of bounties out of the oceans, you should really be in favor of this.

Seth Larson: Okay, moving on from the High Seas Treaty and going back now to the year 2022, we're gonna talk next about the Global Biodiversity Framework being agreed to. Nearly 200 governments participating in the UN Biodiversity Conference in Montreal that year agreed to this framework after years of negotiations.

It set a goal for the world to halt and reverse nature loss by 2030, including by conserving at least 30% of land, freshwater and ocean globally. It was a really big deal, and back in 2024, I asked WWF's Lucia Ruiz, who was at the negotiations in Montreal, to explain why it matters so much. Here's what she had to say.

Lucia Ruiz: This historic agreement actually commits nations to halt and reverse nature loss by 2030. It serves as a north star to guide countries in their actions, setting very ambitious targets for conserving and restoring ecosystems, addressing the drivers of nature loss and enabling conditions to achieve this halting of biodiversity loss, ensuring as well a human-rights-based approach.

Seth Larson: Alright. Moving back a couple more years now to the year 2020, I want to talk about bison returning to their ancestral lands. Plains bison, or buffalo, as the species is often referred to by Native Americans, once numbered in the tens of millions across North America, and they held a special place in the lives and traditions of Native Nations across the continent.

By the late 1800s, barely more than 500 buffalo remained after decades of market hunts, sport hunting, habitat loss, and government-led efforts to eradicate the species. Conservation efforts since then have helped buffalo populations rebound to around 20,000, where they still stand today. There's a lot we could say about bison restoration, but the specific win that I want to highlight took place in 2020 when WWF worked with the US National Park Service, the Siċgaŋġu company, and the Rosebud Tribal Land Enterprise to release a hundred bison onto the Wolakota Buffalo range in South Dakota.

It marked a return to a landscape from which bison had been absent for generations. WWF's Monica Rattling Hawk was there for the release in 2020, and here's what she told me about it during an interview we recorded in 2023.

Monica Rattling Hawk: The most important thing in that was when those hooves touched the ground, I was able to be there. There hadn't been a bison hoof in that particular part of the Rosebud Reservation in 147 years.

Seth Larson: Wow.

Monica Rattling Hawk: So when I think about that in terms of generations, I think of at least three generations that missed seeing that, that missed hearing that, missed feeling that... of our relative being on that landscape, of being with us again. And that was so moving, just to be able to experience that. When they unloaded, we greeted them as women, we lead and the men... and it's just, just, that's how we captured I guess, all of that feeling and all of that emotion and all of that missed opportunity that generations had and we captured it in our voice and expressed it, and that was just so amazing.

Seth Larson: And I'll just add that in the years since the herd has grown by tenfold and the community saw the first bison born on the land in well over a century.

Alright, sticking with the species conservation angle, we're going now to the year 2016 when giant pandas were downgraded from endangered to vulnerable. I'll keep this one short and sweet. And I should say, I've been playing clips to from previous podcast episodes to help illustrate a lot of the wins that we've talked about so far.

I don't have clips for every single win. Some of them will keep a little shorter, this is one. So 2016 giant pandas being downgraded from endangered to vulnerable. I wanted to talk about this one because WWF's logo famously features a black and white giant panda, and I feel like I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that decades of conservation efforts, particularly by the Chinese government, led to this really important progress for that species. So back in 2016, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature announced that the giant panda's status on the red list of threatened species was changing from endangered to vulnerable, after a nationwide census found 1,864 giant pandas in the wild in China. And that was a 17% increase over the previous census two years earlier. So it was a really big deal. Pandas remain vulnerable today, so we shouldn't celebrate too much, but this was really welcome news and marked really important progress after decades of struggling to get this species to rebound.

Next up, just one year earlier in 2015 that marked the adoption of the Paris Agreement.

This might be the most well-known of the accomplishments I'm talking about today. But as a reminder, this was the agreement struck by the nations of the world at COP21 in Paris to guide global action on climate change. It set a goal of limiting global warming by at least two degrees Celsius and ideally by 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

And now it's fair to say that implementation of this agreement has been a mixed bag. The world remains well off track on meeting its goals, but it's also true that the Paris Agreement has spurred a lot of progress and a lot of action that might not otherwise have happened. And similar to the Global Biodiversity Framework for nature, it continues to serve as a north star for countries, companies, and other actors working to secure a brighter climate future.

Alright, next up we're going back to the year 2013. This one actually took place over several years and some of the accomplishments or wins actually came in 2016 or 2017. But the start of this process goes back to 2013. So sticking with the rules of our countdown, I'm putting it here in the order. So this is the global response to the poaching crisis. I think most of us know that the global trade in wildlife products has been a major driver of poaching for many decades. Earlier this century, surging demand for elephant ivory, rhino horn, and other illegal wildlife products led WWF to launch its Stop Wildlife Crime campaign, which put pressure on global leaders to act.

And in response, the United States launched a national strategy to combat wildlife trafficking in 2013 and enacted the End Wildlife Trafficking Act in 2016 to support international efforts to prevent poaching and disrupt illegal trade. Also in 2016, the US implemented a near total ban on the trade of elephant ivory. That led to the UK, Singapore, Hong Kong, and other countries following suit.

And about a year later in 2017, China closed its legal domestic ivory market, which was the largest in the world.

Subsequent reports have indicated that elephant poaching declined significantly following these bans, so they were really important and they've driven really big results.

Alright, next in our list, we're going back to the year 2010 to talk about the rebound of wild tigers. So coming into this century, decades of over-hunting and habitat destruction had caused a steady decline of wild tigers from maybe around a hundred thousand in the early 1900s to just an estimated 3,200 in 2010. That year leaders from tiger range countries, which stretched from Southeast Asia through China, India, and Russia... they came together in St. Petersburg and pledged to work together to double the number of wild tigers by 2022, which was the next Year of the Tiger according to the Chinese lunar calendar.

And since 2010, thanks to conservation efforts, wild tigers have increased from that all time low of 3,200 to roughly 5,500 as of 2024, almost doubling. In India, the country with the most remaining wild tigers has indeed seen wild tigers double since 2010, while the Nepal's wild tiger numbers have nearly tripled. Some of the actions that led to this progress have included things like starting to count tigers better. You can't protect tigers when you don't know where they are or how many you're dealing with, so that has been a really important change that's happened that countries have put a lot more resources into counting tigers and doing these censuses that give us a better baseline and help us measure progress.

That data that came through that process then led to the creation of more protected areas or increased protection in places that were really important for tigers. Indigenous peoples were supported to get involved in tiger conservation because there's an understanding that the people who live closest to nature are often its best stewards.

And also a number of countries took steps to strengthen anti-poaching efforts and crack down on the illegal trade of tigers and tiger parts. We alluded to this in the last conservation win we talked about. And the idea of all that was that if you take away the market for those items, it'll eliminate the incentive for poachers to go after them.

So back in 2022, I interviewed Ginette Hemley, who's WWF's Senior Vice President for Wildlife about some of this progress we've seen in tiger conservation. And I asked her what some of the biggest factors were. Here's what she had to say.

Ginette Hemley: Some of the lessons that we've learned? It's no coincidence that the countries that are making the biggest positive difference, including those five I mentioned, India, Nepal, Bhutan, Russia, and China, we have seen commitments at the highest political levels.

Literally, the heads of state and the responsible ministers in those countries have made tigers a top conservation priority. Second, I think the other key lesson as we go forward among others is that we will not succeed in tiger conservation over the long term if the people living closest to tigers on the ground, the communities, are not involved in conservation as stewards and champions, and if they're not benefiting from tiger conservation.

Seth Larson: Just to wrap up this conservation win, I'll just say there's still plenty of work ahead, but for a species that's steadily declined for roughly a century, it's inspiring to me that countries are working together and they've not only stopped the decline, but they've reversed it. And in doing so, they've inspired similar efforts for other threatened big cat species like jaguars. So really cool stuff and really important.

Okay, next up in our list, we're going back to the year 2007 for the launch of Earth Hour. WWF organized the first Earth Hour in Sydney, Australia in 2007, and the idea was to get as many people as possible to turn off their lights for an hour to raise awareness about climate change. One year later, Earth Hour went global, becoming the world's largest environmental activism event.

And it's not just individuals. Over the years we've seen iconic landmarks like the Golden Gate Bridge and the Empire State Building go dark for Earth Hour.

And in the last few years, WWF has evolved Earth Hour from a moment to raise awareness to an opportunity for people to take action. We now ask Americans each year to 'Give An Hour for Earth' by spending an hour or more of their time protecting, appreciating, or learning about the planet. In 2025, WWF supporters logged nearly 128,000 hours of positive action for Earth, which is more than 14 years worth of impact.

Alright, number nine on our list in the order. In 2002, we marked the creation of the Amazon Region Protected Areas program. As we've covered before, the Amazon is the largest rainforest on Earth. It covers an area nearly the size of the entire continental United States, and it's one of the most biodiverse places on Earth.

It also stores billions of tons of carbon and regulates regional weather patterns. In other words, it's a pretty big deal. But the rainforest has been under threat for decades. Anyone who listened to my October 2024 interview with Jason Clay might remember his story about working with the Grateful Dead to arrange a benefit concert for the rainforest way back in 1988.

That concert, along with many other efforts, helped raise money and awareness about the plight of the Amazon, but none of it was enough to stop deforestation. So in 2002, the government of Brazil, in partnership with WWF and others, launched the Amazon Region Protected Areas Program, a network of protected areas designed to conserve 150 million acres of the Brazilian Amazon. That's roughly the size of one and a half Californias.

Over time, it became clear that more dedicated funding was needed to turn that program into a reality. And in 2014, WWF worked with Brazil and others to launch ARPA for Life, a financing initiative which secured $215 million of long-term funding for the program through an innovative conservation finance approach known as Project Finance for Permanence or PFP.

This approach brings together a government with investors and NGOs to create a bridge fund to help cover conservation costs. And to ensure performance, the government has to achieve certain milestones in order to keep drawing down from the fund. Additionally, just this year in 2025, WWF joined with the Brazilian government again at COP30 to launch ARPA Communities, another PFP which will focus on reducing deforestation in 60 sustainable use areas with a focus on community leadership and sustainable community livelihoods.

Altogether, ARPA represents the world's largest tropical forest conservation program, and it's delivered some really impressive results. Back in 2023, I interviewed Meg Symington, WWF's Vice President for Global Integrated Programs, and a noted expert on the Amazon, to talk about what ARPA has achieved so far. Here's what she said.

Meg Symington: ARPA has played a really important role in Brazil being able to bring down its deforestation by over 70% between 2004 and 2012.

Seth Larson: Wow.

Meg Symington: And a recent paper that just came out in March demonstrated that ARPA, between 2008 and 2020, the protected areas supported by ARPA prevented over a thousand square miles of deforestation.

Seth Larson: Wow.

Meg Symington: And that's the same as preventing about 104 million tons of CO2 emissions.

Seth Larson: Alright, time to go now to our 10th and final conservation win to round out our list. And the last win on our list doesn't have a specific date or year attached to it. It's something that's occurred gradually, but undeniably, in my opinion, over the course of this century. And that's the rise of environmentalism as a mainstream everyday issue of concern for huge swaths of people.

Now, I don't mean that all of us are joining advocacy campaigns and devoting our lives to saving nature. But in lots of smaller ways, nature and climate have become central considerations for millions and millions of people.

The environmental movement has certainly had big moments before, particularly in the 1970s when widespread activism led to the creation of Earth Day, and in the US, the creation of the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act. But heading into the 2000s, I can tell you, as a '90s teen, environmentalism was not really on my radar, and I think that was true for a lot of people.

But since then, we've seen really big shifts. How many of us now make weekly decisions at the grocery store to buy sustainable paper products? How many families have built Meatless Monday into their weekly meal planning? How many have started composting, bringing reusable bags to the grocery store, or switched from a gas vehicle to a hybrid or an EV?

So many of us have seen the consequences of nature loss and climate change in our daily lives, and I think those experiences have given us lots of motivation to make changes where we can. So I just want to close on that note of environmentalism going mainstream, and I think that's a really important win that's gonna give us a better foundation to achieve more progress in the next quarter century.

Alright. That's a wrap for today. As a closing thought, I'll just say there are still huge challenges to tackle in the next 75 years of this century. I certainly hope we'll make more progress, and quickly, on reducing emissions and halting nature loss, but as we celebrate another new year, I think we can take some pride in the conservation wins from the first quarter of the 21st century.

Cheers to all of you who chipped in, in ways both big and small.

Let me also take a moment to thank my colleagues at WWF who helped bring Nature Breaking to life over the last year. There's too many to list here. So many people chipped in on individual episodes to help make sure I was asking the right questions and making sure the episodes were interesting and educational and factual. But I specifically want to shout out Bex Young, Hayley Lawton, Maggie D'Amaro, and Eva Machnitzky. Their help and partnership has been absolutely essential to the show's production this year, and I really appreciate their efforts. Thank you all for listening to Nature Breaking. I really appreciate your eyes and ears and attention.

Have a wonderful New Year and let's keep building a more sustainable future in 2026.