Projects

Over four and a half years, the Google.org-funded Wildlife Crime Technology Project (WCTP) provided WWF a platform to innovate and test a number of innovative technologies, many of which have the potential to change the course of the global fight against wildlife crime. 

Namibia is home to an array of wildlife, from ostriches and zebras roaming the gravel plains to penguins and seals chilling in the Atlantic currents. It was the first African country to incorporate protection of the environment into its constitution. With WWF’s help, the government has reinforced this conservation philosophy by empowering its communities with rights to manage and benefit from the country’s wildlife through communal conservancies.

The Freshwater Challenge is the world’s largest initiative to restore degraded rivers, lakes, and wetlands and to protect vital freshwater ecosystems

WWF’s Wildlife Adaptation Innovation Fund supports the testing of new ideas that have potential to reduce the vulnerability of wildlife to changes in climate through on-the-ground projects. Successes and lessons learned from these pilot projects provide useful guidance that move conservation beyond business-as-usual approaches and successful efforts can be replicated or taken to scale to help wildlife endure under conditions of rapid change.

By taking samples of soil, water, snow, or even air, we can access the environmental DNA (or eDNA) that animals naturally shed—like hair, skin, and feces—as they move through their environment. eDNA can then be used to detect endangered species, study the impacts of climate change, alert us to invisible threats such as pathogens, and assess the overall health of aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems.