Founder’s Briefs: An occasional series where Mongabay founder Rhett Ayers Butler shares analysis, perspectives and story summaries. Twenty months after the dismantling of USAID, a new analysis documents what the international development agency’s disappearance has meant for conservation projects around the world. Projects have stalled or collapsed in countries from Kenya to Bangladesh, reports Mongabay’s Ashoka Mukpo. Wildlife patrols, forest monitoring, community conservation programs and environmental policy work have all been hit. The report draws on interviews and surveys involving 150 people familiar with the agency’s work in Bangladesh, Peru, Kenya, Colombia and Vietnam. It was produced by One Earth Partners, a consultancy founded by former senior USAID officials Monica Bansal and Hadas Kushnir. U.S. President Donald Trump’s dismantlement of USAID removed nearly $1 billion from global conservation and environment funding. USAID spent $366 million on biodiversity conservation and $257 million on climate adaptation in fiscal year 2024, plus hundreds of millions more on clean energy, natural climate solutions, ocean plastics and pollution. The report traces what happened to some of that work after the agency was dismantled. USAID had trained officials in Colombia and Peru to use satellite data to monitor Amazon deforestation. It was a major supporter of anti-poaching and wildlife law enforcement at Mozambique’s Gorongosa National Park. In Bangladesh, nearly two decades of work had gone into helping communities develop nature-based tourism and negotiate revenue-sharing arrangements around protected areas. Kenya was particularly hard hit. Daniel Sopia, who heads the Maasai Mara Wildlife Conservancies Association, told Mongabay that…This article was originally published on Mongabay

On June 17, 2015, Philippine officials confiscated thousands of turtles in cement tanks from a warehouse in Palawan, an island province in the Philippines. More than 3,800 of them were endangered Palawan forest turtles (Siebenrockiella leytensis), piled as many as a dozen deep, awaiting export. Some had ulcers on the undersides of their shells or open wounds on their feet; others had been bitten by turtles crowded in alongside them. Sabine Schoppe organized the response. No facility was equipped to deal with thousands of turtles so students built shade and shelters. A former crocodile enclosure was turned into an emergency pond. Schoppe and her colleagues worked around the clock, joined by veterinarians and turtle specialists who came from abroad. “Yesterday by sadness and work, now by hope,” she wrote after help began arriving. Schoppe had arrived in the Philippines from Germany in 1995 after completing a doctorate in biology. She began with bird surveys and coastal resource management in the Visayas before moving to the State Polytechnic College of Palawan, now Western Philippines University, where she was a guest professor of aquatic and marine biology. She also became an associate editor of The Palawan Scientist. The bakoko, as the Palawan forest turtle is known locally, was first described scientifically from specimens said to have come from the Philippine island of Leyte. Those specimens were later destroyed during the bombing of Manila in World War II. For decades scientists didn’t know where the turtles lived until they were eventually found in…This article was originally published on Mongabay