#rewilding

🇰🇬 Kyrgyzstan · Ilbirs Foundation

An 800,000-hectare high-altitude corridor now links protected areas across central Kyrgyzstan so snow leopards, ibex, and herders can adapt together to a warming climate.

🇰🇿 Kazakhstan · Altyn Dala Conservation Initiative

Altyn Dala restores Kazakhstan's grassland steppe and protects migratory saiga antelope through anti-poaching and habitat corridors.

🇺🇸 United States · American Prairie

A grassroots effort to stitch together the largest nature reserve in the continental United States across Montana's shortgrass and mixed-grass prairie.

🇺🇸 United States · American Rivers

The US nonprofit behind the country's biggest-ever dam removal, which reopened 400 miles of the Klamath River to salmon in 2024.

🇱🇹 Lithuania · Sengirės fondas (Ancient Woods Foundation)

A Lithuanian foundation is buying up the country's last old-growth forest fragments, one plot at a time, and leaving them wild forever.

🇦🇷 Argentina · Fundación Banco de Bosques

A lean Argentine foundation lets anyone "buy" a square meter of native forest online, and used the crowd-funded model to help create a 128,000-hectare national park.

🇸🇦 Saudi Arabia · Arabian Leopard Fund

A Saudi non-profit is funding the breeding and eventual rewilding of the Arabian leopard, a big cat so rare that fewer of them survive in the wild than there are spots on a single coat.

🇷🇺 Russia · Pleistocene Park

Snow insulates the ground like a duvet, so the permafrost beneath never gets properly cold. Large animals trample it flat — which is the entire theory behind this park.

🇷🇴 Romania · Foundation Conservation Carpathia

A Romanian foundation is buying up clear-cut mountainsides in the Făgăraș Mountains and letting bison, beavers and old-growth forest reclaim them.

🇦🇺 Australia · Science for Wildlife

As Australia's 2019-20 megafires closed in, this research charity raced to rescue a genetically vital koala colony, then tracked and rebuilt the burned bushland they depend on.

🇩🇯 Djibouti · DECAN (Découvrir et Aider la Nature)

A veterinarian-founded refuge and its two wildlife reserves are Djibouti's main line of defense against the poaching of its rarest antelopes.

🇻🇳 Vietnam · International Crane Foundation

Tram Chim kept its water high to look like a healthy wetland, and the eastern sarus cranes stopped coming; now the park is drying it on purpose and flying birds in from Thailand.

🇦🇹 Austria · VIER PFOTEN – Eulen- und Greifvogelstation Haringsee

A breeding station outside Vienna has helped return Europe's largest bird of prey to the Alpine skies it vanished from a century ago.

🇺🇿 Uzbekistan · Saiga Conservation Alliance

Since 2004 a researcher-led alliance has worked with schools, ex-hunters and rangers on Uzbekistan's Ustyurt plateau and the dried Aral seabed to pull the critically endangered saiga antelope back from the brink.

🇩🇪 Germany · Deutsche Wildtier Stiftung

A Hamburg-based foundation buys up forests, moors, meadows and farmland across Germany and manages them purely for native wildlife.

🇮🇪 Ireland · Irish Peatland Conservation Council

Ireland cut and burned its bogs for centuries; since 1982 this small charity has been quietly buying the survivors and handing them back to sphagnum.

🇬🇧 United Kingdom · Cairngorms Connect

Four neighbouring landowners in the Scottish Highlands joined a 200-year plan to restore native forest, peatland and rivers across 60,000 hectares.

🇬🇳 Guinea · Chimpanzee Conservation Center (Projet Primates)

The only chimpanzee sanctuary in Guinea rescues orphans of the illegal wildlife trade and releases rehabilitated groups back into Haut Niger National Park.

🇹🇯 Tajikistan · Association of Nature Conservation Organizations of Tajikistan (ANCOT)

A Dushanbe-based conservation network unites family- and community-run conservancies across Tajikistan's mountains, turning former poachers into rangers protecting markhor, urial and snow leopard.

🌍 Global · Dam Removal Europe

A pan-European coalition that tore down a record 603 obsolete dams, weirs and culverts in 2025 alone to let rivers run wild again.

🇺🇸 United States · Depave

Volunteers tear up unused asphalt and concrete across Portland, turning parking lots and schoolyards back into soil, trees and community green space.

🇱🇨 Saint Lucia · Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust

Since 1986, Durrell has worked to pull Saint Lucia's endemic snakes, lizards and birds back from the edge of extinction on the island's offshore islets.

🇨🇴 Colombia · Fundación ProAves

Colombia's leading bird conservation NGO protects a cloud forest reserve ranked the most irreplaceable protected area on Earth.

🇪🇪 Estonia · Eestimaa Looduse Fond (Estonian Fund for Nature)

Estonia's oldest nature NGO restores old-growth forests and wooded meadows while running volunteer road patrols to save migrating frogs.

🇲🇰 North Macedonia · Eko-svest (Center for Research and Information on Environment)

Eko-svest tore out an unneeded 50-metre concrete barrier from the Pčinja River, reopening 72 kilometres of free-flowing habitat for North Macedonia's freshwater fish.

🇺🇸 United States · Friends of the Everglades

Founded in 1969 by Marjory Stoneman Douglas, this Florida watchdog group sues, lobbies and campaigns to send clean fresh water flowing south again through the Everglades wetlands.

🇪🇸 Spain · Fundación Global Nature

Since 1990, this Spanish foundation has been re-flooding a steppe lagoon drained decades ago, turning wheat fields back into a wintering ground for tens of thousands of geese and cranes.

🇲🇽 Mexico · Grupo de Ecología y Conservación de Islas, A.C. (GECI)

A Baja California NGO clears rats, cats and goats off Mexico's islands, and formerly extinct seabird colonies are returning by the thousands.

🇸🇪 Sweden · Svenska Rovdjursföreningen (Swedish Carnivore Association)

Since 1997, Sweden's leading predator-advocacy group has fought for wolves, lynx, bears and wolverines to survive on facts, not fear.

🇲🇿 Mozambique · Gorongosa Restoration Project

Public-private restoration project rebuilding Mozambique's Gorongosa National Park after wildlife populations collapsed in civil war.

🇲🇳 Mongolia · Mongolian Rangeland Research Center (Green Gold)

A 16-year Swiss-backed program organized Mongolian herders into pasture-user groups that rested millions of hectares of overgrazed steppe back to health.

🇱🇺 Luxembourg · Fondation Hëllef fir d'Natur (natur&ëmwelt)

A homegrown Luxembourg foundation buys and manages a growing patchwork of wetlands, orchid meadows and forests while nursing thousands of injured wild animals back to health each year.

🇹🇿 Tanzania · Grumeti Fund

Once-barren, poached-out savanna in the western Serengeti corridor has been brought back to life through anti-poaching patrols, fire management and invasive-plant clearance.

🇪🇨 Ecuador · Fundación EcoMinga

A scientist-founded Ecuadorian NGO has assembled 15 private reserves protecting cloud forest and páramo along the eastern and western Andes.

🇬🇾 Guyana · Iwokrama International Centre

A one-of-a-kind treaty between Guyana and the Commonwealth put 371,000 hectares of pristine rainforest under community-run, science-based management instead of the chainsaw.

🇺🇸 United States · Borderlands Restoration Network

Borderlands Restoration Network installs thousands of erosion-control structures across the Sky Islands drylands of the US-Mexico borderlands to heal gullied land and recharge groundwater.

🇬🇧 United Kingdom · Hedgehog Street (People's Trust for Endangered Species & British Hedgehog Preservation Society)

Neighbours across Britain cut fist-sized holes through garden fences to stitch fragmented city gardens back into a connected habitat for declining hedgehogs.

🇧🇷 Brazil · Instituto Terra

Sebastião Salgado's institute that regrew a barren cattle farm into thriving Atlantic Forest.

🇵🇪 Peru · Junglekeepers

Protects one of the last wild stretches of Peruvian Amazon along the Las Piedras River in Madre de Dios.

🇦🇺 Australia · Kanyirninpa Jukurrpa

Martu Traditional Owners run four ranger teams protecting threatened desert wildlife and culture across millions of hectares of Western Australia's Western Desert.

🇵🇦 Panama · Fundación Yaguará Panamá

Panama is the narrowest pinch-point in the jaguar's range from Mexico to Argentina, and this NGO's biologists collar cats and rewire ranches to keep the corridor open.

🇱🇻 Latvia · Latvijas Dabas fonds (Latvian Fund for Nature)

Latvia's oldest nature conservation NGO has restored thousands of hectares of coastal meadows and bogs to bring back the country's rarest birds.

🇨🇬 Republic of the Congo · The Aspinall Foundation

Orphaned gorillas raised by The Aspinall Foundation are rewilded into the Republic of Congo's 173,000-hectare Lésio-Louna Reserve, once emptied by hunting.

🇵🇭 Philippines · Masungi Georeserve Foundation

An award-winning geotourism and restoration project protecting 2,700 hectares of 60-million-year-old karst landscape in the Upper Marikina Watershed.

🇦🇹 Austria · Nationalpark Donau-Auen

Between Vienna and Bratislava, engineers and ecologists are reconnecting cut-off side-arms of the Danube to bring Central Europe's last great river floodplain back to life.

🇺🇸 United States · Loess Canyons Rangeland Alliance

Nebraska ranchers formed the state's first prescribed burn association, pooling equipment and labor to torch encroaching cedar trees and bring their grasslands back to life.

🇳🇵 Nepal · Nepal River Conservation Trust (NRCT)

Nepal's oldest river-conservation group, running weekly clean-ups and a 25-year-old festival to restore Kathmandu's sacred Bagmati River.

🇨🇬 Republic of the Congo · Wildlife Conservation Society

Rangers in a 4,334 km² Congo Basin rainforest park recorded zero detected elephant poaching in 2023 for the first time in its 30-year history.

🇦🇬 Antigua and Barbuda · Environmental Awareness Group (EAG)

Antigua's oldest environmental NGO turned a near-extinct endemic snake into one of the world's great reptile comeback stories by clearing invasive predators from 16 offshore islands.

🇦🇺 Australia · Operation Crayweed (UNSW Sydney / Sydney Institute of Marine Science)

Scientists and volunteers are replanting Sydney's lost underwater crayweed forests, reef by reef.

🇿🇦 South Africa · Overberg Renosterveld Trust

A South African trust partners with farmers to protect the world's most biodiverse and most destroyed lowland habitat, home to a huge diversity of solitary bee and bee-fly pollinators.

🌍 Global · Peace Parks Foundation

NGO stitching southern African national parks across colonial-era borders into connected transboundary conservation landscapes.

🇳🇿 New Zealand · Predator Free NZ Trust

New Zealand's nationwide mission to eradicate rats, stoats, and possums by 2050 so native birds can thrive again.

🇬🇷 Greece · Society for the Protection of Prespa

Water buffalo and cattle are the conservation machinery here: grazed back into shape, the wet meadows of Lesser Prespa now hold the largest breeding colony of Dalmatian pelicans on Earth.

🇻🇨 Saint Vincent and the Grenadines · Rare Species Conservatory Foundation (RSCF)

For nearly three decades, a conservation team has partnered with St. Vincent's Forestry Department to protect the island's flamboyant, endemic national bird from extinction.

🌍 Global · Rainforest Trust

A US nonprofit that buys and protects threatened rainforest to safeguard biodiversity.

🇷🇺 Russia · Center for the Rescue of Orphan Bear Cubs (Pazhetnov Center)

In a Tver Region village, a family of biologists has spent three decades hand-raising motherless brown bear cubs so they can grow up wild enough to survive without ever imprinting on humans.

🇦🇲 Armenia · Foundation for the Preservation of Wildlife and Cultural Assets (FPWC)

Since 2011 an Armenian NGO has been leasing degraded farmland from local communities to rebuild the only privately protected wildlife area in the South Caucasus, now a refuge for the Critically Endangered Caucasian leopard.

🇹🇷 Türkiye · KuzeyDoğa Society

Türkiye has drained most of its lakes in a century; in the far north-east, one society got water back into a Ramsar site that had turned to cracked mud.

🇮🇹 Italy · Salviamo l'Orso

With fewer than 60 Marsican brown bears left on Earth, this Abruzzo-based group is stripping old farm fencing and replanting fruit trees to reopen the bear's mountain corridors.

🇦🇺 Australia · Carbon Neutral

The Yarra Yarra Biodiversity Corridor is replanting a 200-kilometre strip of native mallee bush across Western Australia's salt-degraded wheatbelt to lower salinity and rebuild eroded farmland.

🇧🇷 Brazil · SOS Mata Atlântica

A Brazilian NGO has spent over three decades restoring the Atlantic Forest, one of the world's most biodiverse and most destroyed rainforests.

🇮🇶 Iraq · Nature Iraq

Iraq's first conservation NGO fights to keep the Garden of Eden's marshes alive as upstream dams and drought squeeze the water that sustains the Marsh Arabs.

🇩🇪 Germany · Michael Succow Foundation

Drained peat soils are one of Europe's largest hidden carbon leaks, and this Greifswald foundation floods them back while teaching farmers to grow crops in the wet.

🇦🇷 Argentina · Fundación Rewilding Argentina

Reintroduces jaguars and other lost species while restoring vast protected landscapes across Argentina.

🇨🇱 Chile · Fundación Rewilding Chile

Carries on the Tompkins legacy by creating national parks and rewilding Chilean Patagonia.

🌍 Global · Rewilding Europe

Letting nature lead across vast European landscapes, from the Iberian Highlands to the Danube Delta.

🇬🇧 United Kingdom · Trees for Life

This Highlands charity has grown more than two million native trees to bring Scotland's lost Caledonian pinewood back to life.

🇺🇦 Ukraine · Rewilding Ukraine

A Ukrainian conservation team is restoring wetlands and steppe in the Danube Delta and releasing wild grazers, even as the war continues around them.

🌍 Global · Rivers without Boundaries Coalition

A Mongolia-registered coalition fighting a decade-long battle to stop mega-dams on the rivers that feed Lake Baikal.

🌍 Global · Ríos to Rivers

A youth exchange nonprofit whose trainees made the first-ever 310-mile descent of the newly free-flowing Klamath River.

🇲🇺 Mauritius · Mauritian Wildlife Foundation

Mauritius' only conservation NGO dedicated exclusively to its endangered endemic species has pulled birds like the pink pigeon and echo parakeet back from the brink of extinction.

🇰🇪 Kenya · Sheldrick Wildlife Trust

Kenya's pioneering orphan-elephant rescue that raises and rewilds calves orphaned by poaching and drought.

🇫🇮 Finland · Snowchange Cooperative

A Finnish cooperative buys up ruined peat-mining land and lets local and Sámi communities rewild it back into carbon-storing wetlands.

🇳🇱 Netherlands · Stichting Steenbreek

A national Dutch foundation gets residents and city councils competing to pry up paving tiles from front gardens and streets and replace them with plants.

🇬🇸 South Georgia · South Georgia Heritage Trust

Sealers left rats on South Georgia two centuries ago and they ate the chicks of birds that nest nowhere else. Clearing them took three helicopters, six years and three dogs walking a thousand miles.

🇵🇱 Poland · Stowarzyszenie dla Natury "Wilk" (Association for Nature "Wolf")

Since 1996, this Polish NGO has run the national census that tracks the country's recovering wolf population and worked to keep it wild.

🇷🇴 Romania · Milvus Group (Bird and Nature Protection Association)

Since 1991, Romania's oldest wildlife NGO has GPS-collared dozens of Carpathian brown bears, rescued orphaned cubs, and helped farmers coexist with the EU's largest bear population.

🇬🇪 Georgia · NACRES – Centre for Biodiversity Conservation & Research

Georgia's oldest biodiversity NGO runs camera traps across the Caucasus mountains that caught the country's first confirmed leopard sighting in over a decade, and works with herders to keep predators and livestock apart.

🇬🇧 United Kingdom · Severn Rivers Trust

A UK river charity that built four fish passes to reopen the River Severn to twaite shad after nearly 180 years of exclusion.

🇸🇰 Slovakia · Lesoochranárske zoskupenie VLK (WOLF Forest Protection Movement)

A Slovak grassroots group that buys up old-growth forest tree by tree and has twice won landmark environmental-rights rulings at the EU's top court.

🇳🇿 New Zealand · Te Waihora Co-Governance Group

Te Waihora was Ngāi Tahu's great food basket before drainage and dairy runoff turned it into one of New Zealand's most polluted lakes; iwi and regional council now run its recovery together.

🇨🇷 Costa Rica · Osa Conservation

A nonprofit protects Costa Rica's biodiverse Osa Peninsula, running wildlife corridors, camera traps, and canopy bridges for jaguars and monkeys.

🇦🇹 Austria · Schutzgebietsverwaltung Wildnisgebiet Dürrenstein-Lassingtal

In the mountains between Lower Austria and Styria, roughly 460 hectares of forest have never known a chainsaw, forming the largest primeval-forest remnant left in the Alps.

🇦🇱 Albania · EcoAlbania

A small Tirana-based NGO spent a decade fighting hydropower dams to help turn the free-flowing Vjosa into Europe's first Wild River National Park.