BAKU, Azerbaijan (November 15, 2024)—Rio Tinto has committed $16 million to the Makira Natural Park REDD+ Project in northern Madagascar, through a new partnership with the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and Everland. This commitment complements Rio Tinto’s investment in nature-based solutions in the south-east of the country.   The Makira Natural Park REDD+ Project encompasses 372,000 hectares of dense primary forest. One of the largest remaining rainforests in the...

New York, NY -- Madagascar’s Makira-Masoala wilderness will receive an annual $1 million grant through a new agreement between the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and Legacy Landscapes Fund (LLF), with support from Arcadia. The agreement provides annual funding of $1 million per year under LLF’s perpetual funding model, which will help preserve the integrity of Madagascar’s climate-critical eastern rainforests and support the area’s ecosystem services. ...

On April 1, 2023, Dr. Luthando Dziba is joining the Wildlife Conservation Society as its East Africa, Madagascar and the Western Indian Ocean Regional Director, based in Kigali

A new study by WCS looks at the prevalence of human consumption of lemur and fossa (Madagascar’s largest predator) in villages within and around Makira Natural Park, northeastern Madagascar, providing up-to-date estimates of the percentage of households who eat meat from these protected species.

As conservationists grapple with unprecedented levels of coral reef bleaching in the world’s warming oceans, scientists in the Indian and Pacific Oceans used the most recent El Nino of 2016 (the warmest year on record) to evaluate the role of excess heat as the leading driver of coral bleaching.

WCS welcomes Madagascar’s new commitment to halt the trafficking of rosewood species, as the country’s representatives announced at the CITES CoP18 this week.

Singing humpback whales from different ocean basins seem to be picking up musical ideas from afar, and incorporating these new phrases and themes into the latest song, according to a newly published study in Royal Society Open Science that’s helping scientists better understand how whales learn and change their musical compositions.

As groups gather for the Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco from Sept 12-14, WCS has released a video showcasing how communities in Madagascar are doing their part to fight climate change.  Watch the video here. Local indigenous communities in the Makira landscape have limited access to economic opportunities and relied on traditional forms of natural resource extraction such as illegal logging and land-intensive rice farming for their survival. These livelihoods not only ca...

June 15, 2017 -- Cool Effect^TM, a non-profit organization curating the world’s premier carbon reduction projects, announced the addition of Madagascar’s Makira Natural Park Project to its platform in partnership with the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS). Individual contributions to the project will reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation and conserve the rainforest’s endangered plants and species.

March 23, 2017 – Scientists from WCS have discovered a new species of wild ginger, spicing up a wave of recent wildlife discoveries in the Kabobo Massif – a rugged, mountainous region in Democratic Republic of Congo.