It is being called the Phoenix Species Project, and its ambition is as plain as its name: take one hundred threatened animals and plants and fund their recovery until each one can survive in the wild without our help. The Bezos Earth Fund announced the 200 million dollar commitment this week in partnership with Re:wild, the conservation group co founded by biologist Wes Sechrest and Leonardo DiCaprio, and rather than one grand gesture, the money flows to dozens of local efforts, each shaped around what one species actually needs.
Among the hundred are the clouded leopard and nine other small cat species, the quiet, rarely seen felines that big conservation money usually passes over. That is the loveliest thing about the project: it backs the overlooked, the local, and the patient, the same slow work that brought back the Iberian lynx and the kakapo. One hundred species now have a decade of certainty, and the people who love them can plan further ahead than the next grant.
Our short take: reported by Scott Tong for WBUR's Here and Now, August 2026. Cover photograph: a clouded leopard by Susan Shepard, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.