Science Projects

• Alumni Grants

  Alumni grants aim to support EFN alumni to connect, develop, and sustain their conservation science capacity and leadership; strengthen relationships and exchange of knowledge, ideas, and innovations; and increase national, regional, and global collaborations.

  

• Improving Renewable Siting

  A dramatic expansion of renewable sources of electricity—such as wind, solar and hydropower—is required to meet goals for delivering climate-safe and abundant electricity. This transition must happen in a way that does not negatively impact communities or landscapes, such as the widespread loss of healthy rivers and floodplains to hydropower dams or the conversion or degradation of important terrestrial and marine habitats to wind and solar expansion and transmission lines. WWF scientists, with partners, are researching pathways to expand renewable energy through policies and practices that meet urgent climate goals while minimizing negative impacts to social and environmental resources.

  

• Exploring Systems

  WWF is working to transform how we plan, implement, and evaluate programs to better adapt to the changing needs of our complex world. Through guiding principles, practical tools, and real-world stories, we strive to make systems thinking practical and accessible for those seeking to create inclusive, impactful, and adaptive solutions to today's toughest problems.

  

• Ensuring Sustainable Plates

  The food system is the single greatest driver of environmental degradation. Transforming how the world produces and consumes food, from land and the sea, is essential to stabilizing the climate and protecting nature and its services. As one critical area of research, WWF scientists are identifying and developing the science required to fill knowledge gaps on the dietary shifts needed within each country to achieve nutrition guidelines for all people. These take into account each country’s commitments to global targets to understand how food system transformation pathways will take shape at the local scale to simultaneously achieve global health, climate, and biodiversity goals.

  

• The Alliance for Conservation Evidence and Sustainability

  The Alliance for Conservation Evidence and Sustainability (ACES) is a network of conservation non-governmental organizations committed to improving conservation monitoring, evaluation, and learning. Operating as a formal collaborative between 2016 and 2022, ACES developed tools and approaches for generating, synthesizing, and using evidence to improve community-based conservation and conservation decision-making. ACES projects explored the establishment, persistence, and scaling of community-based conservation in 12 place-based learning projects, in service of catalyzing more effective, inclusive, and durable conservation outcomes.