The Species Recovery Alliance was announced on October 16 at the Leaders' Summit of COP17, the United Nations biodiversity conference held in Yerevan, Armenia.

The Bezos Earth Fund has committed $100 million toward a combined $500 million effort spanning nine founding organizations, including Re:wild, co-founded by Leonardo DiCaprio, and Rainforest Trust.

The remaining founders are the Colossal Foundation, Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund, Fondation Segré, Franklinia Foundation, Ayers Wild Cat Conservation Trust and WildLives Earth.

Rather than pooling money in a single fund, the alliance's members will manage their own grants while coordinating priorities to avoid duplication — a deliberately decentralized structure.

The strategic emphasis also marks a shift away from passive land protection: species that have dropped to very low numbers need hands-on work such as captive breeding and managed reintroductions, veterinary interventions against disease, eradication of invasive predators and rebuilding damaged habitats.

Cristián Samper, the fund's nature solutions lead, has warned that unreliable funding can sink recovery efforts even after teams make substantial progress.

The IUCN Red List currently flags more than 49,500 species as threatened with extinction, and the alliance concentrates on the three highest-risk categories — endangered, critically endangered and extinct in the wild — which together cover more than 31,000 species.

According to Geosirius, more than 10% of the critically endangered species targeted by the alliance have fewer than 50 living individuals. Progress will be tracked through the IUCN Red List and the Green Status of Species, which measures genuine recovery rather than mere stabilization.

Private capital is stepping in as public pledges lag.

At the 2022 UN biodiversity summit in Montreal, countries agreed to mobilize $200 billion annually for biodiversity by 2030, yet OECD figures cited by the Associated Press put actual annual funding at $75 billion to $92 billion from 2023 through 2025 — a gap of over $100 billion a year.

A UN progress report issued ahead of the October summit also found fewer than half of national biodiversity targets on track. Alongside the alliance, 17 governments led by Colombia and Armenia launched the parallel CARES coalition.

The alliance builds on the Phoenix Species Project, a separate $200 million effort launched in August 2026 by the Bezos Earth Fund and Re:wild to recover 100 critically endangered or extinct-in-the-wild species across 30 countries, including Madagascar's golden-crowned sifaka and Australia's night parrot.

The Bezos Earth Fund, created in 2020 with a $10 billion pledge, has distributed $2.4 billion so far, leaving more than $7 billion to allocate by 2030. Lauren Sánchez Bezos framed the stakes plainly: species can vanish before children ever get the chance to know they existed.