The $500M Species Recovery Alliance Has No Application Portal. Here Is How Conservation Groups Can Get Funded Through Its Nine Members

On October 16, 2026, at the Leaders' Summit of the 17th Conference of the Parties (COP17) to the Convention on Biological Diversity in Yerevan, Armenia, nine private funders announced the Species Recovery Alliance. Together they are coordinating more than $500 million over five years to prevent extinctions and recover the world's most threatened species.

The nine founding members:

1. Ayers Wild Cat Conservation Trust
2. Bezos Earth Fund
3. Colossal Foundation
4. Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund (CEPF)
5. Fondation Segré
6. Fondation Franklinia
7. Rainforest Trust
8. Re:wild
9. WildLives Earth

The alliance calls itself the largest coordinated philanthropic effort ever made for threatened species. On October 21, Fortune reported that the Bezos Earth Fund is contributing $100 million, a figure the alliance left out of its own announcement.

The question for anyone working on endangered species is simple: how do I get some of this money? The answer is that you do not apply to the alliance. This analysis explains why, and what to do instead.

How the alliance is structured

The money is not pooled

According to Re:wild's announcement, members "will not pool funds." Instead they will "coordinate and align investments, share knowledge, and work with local partners." Each member keeps full control of its own grants.

This means:

• There is no alliance secretariat taking applications
• There is no common request for proposals
• There is no single set of eligibility rules
• Each of the nine members keeps its own grant channel, its own criteria and its own decision-makers

The alliance is best understood as a shared strategy and reporting framework placed on top of nine existing grant programs.

Which species qualify

The alliance focuses on the three highest-risk categories on the IUCN Red List: Extinct in the Wild, Critically Endangered and Endangered. According to the IUCN figures cited in the announcement:

• More than 31,000 species fall into these three categories
• More than 10,000 of them are Critically Endangered
• More than 10% of those species have fewer than 50 individuals left
• Research cited by the alliance finds that 57% of threatened species need targeted recovery work beyond habitat protection

That last figure is the alliance's main argument. Its members say that protected areas alone will not save these species, and the announcement lists the kinds of work they expect to fund: conservation breeding, habitat restoration, genetic rescue, reintroductions, disease mitigation, invasive species control and anti-poaching.

Species listed only as Vulnerable or Near Threatened are outside the stated scope.

How success will be measured

Members will report progress using the IUCN Red List and the IUCN Green Status of Species. The Red List measures extinction risk. The Green Status, which is newer and less widely used, measures how far a species has recovered compared with its historical range and ecological function, and how much of that recovery is due to conservation action.

For applicants, this is the most useful detail in the announcement. Proposals that describe their expected outcomes in Green Status terms (for example, which parts of the range will hold a population that is viable and functional at the end of the project) will match the metric the funders have publicly committed to report.

How much of the $500 million is new?

It is hard to say. On average, $500 million over five years is about $100 million a year across nine funders. The Bezos Earth Fund's $100 million is a fifth of the total.

The alliance says it "builds on" the Phoenix Species Project, which the Bezos Earth Fund and Re:wild launched in August 2026 with $100 million each ($200 million in total) to recover 100 species across 30 countries. Fortune named Madagascar's golden-crowned sifaka and Australia's night parrot among the target species. Neither the alliance nor its members have said whether Phoenix's $200 million is counted inside the $500 million. CEOWORLD noted that it would be premature to assume the alliance total is entirely new money.

The careful interpretation is that a large share of the $500 million may already have been committed through programs like Phoenix and through members' existing species budgets. What the alliance adds is coordination and shared measurement. That is still worth something: coordinated funders can avoid funding the same species twice and can leave fewer species with no funder at all.

The wider context: the public money gap

At the 2022 Kunming-Montreal summit, countries committed to raising $200 billion a year for biodiversity from all sources by 2030. According to OECD figures reported by the Associated Press and cited by Fortune, the actual amount for 2023 through 2025 was between $75 billion and $92 billion a year, less than half the target. A UN progress report found that fewer than half of countries' national biodiversity targets are on track.

Alongside the private alliance, 17 governments led by Colombia and Armenia launched a separate initiative at COP17: the Coalition of Action to Recover Endangered Species (CARES), which supports Target 4 of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, the goal of halting human-caused extinction of known threatened species. The alliance says its $500 million commitment is independent of CARES.

For U.S. organizations there is a domestic comparison. Five days after COP17, the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced $35.5 million for 110 first-round National Species Recovery Grants, which we analyzed here. The private alliance's annual budget is roughly three times that first federal round, but its focus is global and, for several members, mostly tropical.

The nine members, sorted by how you can reach them

Because there is no common front door, the practical step is to sort the nine members by how a field organization actually reaches each one. Grant processes change, so confirm current details on each funder's site before you invest time.

Members that run structured grant programs

• Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund (CEPF). CEPF has the longest record in this group. Since 2001 it has granted more than $350 million to more than 2,800 organizations in 112 countries, supporting work on more than 1,400 threatened species. CEPF works through biodiversity hotspots and issues calls for proposals in each hotspot through a regional implementation team. Civil society organizations in eligible countries in an active hotspot have the most direct route into the alliance. Find the regional team for your hotspot and register for its call alerts.
• Fondation Franklinia. Franklinia funds the conservation of threatened trees and supports the global assessment of more than 60,000 tree species. Its director general, Jean-Christophe Vié, made a point at the launch that most conservation funding overlooks: "The number of threatened trees is more than twice the number of threatened terrestrial vertebrate species." If you work on a Critically Endangered or Endangered tree species, you face far less competition than people working on mammals.

Members that fund through partnerships

• Rainforest Trust mainly funds land purchase and the creation of protected areas through local partner organizations in the tropics. Its CEO, James Deutsch, said at the launch that it will concentrate on habitat critical to Endangered and Critically Endangered species in tropical and subtropical regions. Rainforest Trust generally builds relationships with in-country partners rather than running open competitions. If you are a national conservation NGO with a land-protection project for a site that holds threatened species, contact them directly.
• Re:wild co-leads the Phoenix Species Project and generally works through long-term partnerships with local organizations. Its "lost species" and species-recovery work is the clearest guide to its priorities.
• The Bezos Earth Fund, the largest contributor, does not accept unsolicited proposals. Its species money is most likely to flow through Phoenix and through partners such as Re:wild.

Specialized members

• Ayers Wild Cat Conservation Trust focuses on wild cats.
• Colossal Foundation, the nonprofit arm connected to the de-extinction company Colossal Biosciences, focuses on genetic rescue, biobanking and related technology.
• Fondation Segré and WildLives Earth fund species and habitat conservation through their own processes.

For these funders, the realistic way in is when your species and your method match their focus closely.

Strategy for conservation organizations

1. Check your species' Red List category before anything else. Endangered, Critically Endangered or Extinct in the Wild is the threshold. If your species' assessment is out of date and a new assessment would likely move it into one of these categories, helping to complete that assessment through the relevant IUCN Species Survival Commission specialist group is useful work in itself.
2. Describe outcomes the way the funders will report them. Explain what your project will change in the species' Green Status: which spatial units will hold a viable, functional population, and how much of that improvement your actions will cause.
3. Show why protection alone is not enough. The alliance's case rests on the 57% of threatened species that need direct intervention. If your project is captive breeding, translocation, disease management or invasive species removal, say clearly why habitat protection alone would fail.
4. Approach CEPF and Franklinia first. They are the members with the most predictable, structured grant processes.
5. For partnership-driven members, ask for a meeting, not a grant. Rainforest Trust and Re:wild build long-term relationships with local partners. A short concept note and a site visit are worth more than a full proposal sent without an invitation.
6. Watch for new members. The Bezos Earth Fund's Cristián Samper said: "We call on more funders to join the alliance." Any funder that joins will bring its own channel, and probably a fresh budget looking for projects.

The alliance does not change the basic economics of conservation fundraising: most of this money will go to organizations its members already know. What it does change is the shared language. For the next five years, species recovery funding from these nine members will be described in Red List categories and Green Status scores, and proposals that use the same terms will be easier for them to fund.

Granted can help conservation organizations find active calls from CEPF, Franklinia and other species funders, and draft proposals that match each funder's criteria.