#wildlife-rescue

🇨🇦 Canada · Whale Sanctuary Project

A nonprofit is building North America's first seaside sanctuary for retired captive whales in a netted bay in Nova Scotia, Canada.

🌍 Global · African Parks

A conservation NGO that takes on full management of Africa's national parks to protect wildlife at scale.

🇰🇬 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 Arab Emirates · Environment Agency – Abu Dhabi

Government conservation agency that reintroduced Arabian oryx to the UAE desert, helping the species recover from near-extinction.

🇦🇺 Australia · Australian Wildlife Conservancy

Australia's largest private conservation landholder, safeguarding threatened species behind feral-free fences.

🇧🇸 Bahamas · Bahamas Marine Mammal Research Organisation (BMMRO)

A Bahamian research team has spent more than three decades tracking whales and dolphins by small boat, building the only long-term record of marine mammal life in Bahamian waters.

🇲🇷 Mauritania · BACoMaB Trust Fund (Fonds Fiduciaire du Banc d'Arguin et de la Biodiversité Côtière et Marine)

A Nouakchott-based conservation trust fund permanently finances ranger patrols, science and community programs across Mauritania's marine protected areas.

🇭🇷 Croatia · Blue World Institute

A Croatian marine research institute whose 30-plus-year dolphin study won the Mediterranean's first bottlenose dolphin reserve and has hosted over 100,000 visitors at its island education centre.

🇸🇦 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.

🇩🇯 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.

🇪🇪 Estonia · Wildlife Estonia (Eesti Loodushoiu Keskus)

A Tartu-based NGO is restocking the Atlantic sturgeon, functionally extinct in Estonia for decades, in the Narva and Pärnu rivers.

🇦🇹 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.

🇧🇬 Bulgaria · Green Balkans

A captive-release programme has restored Europe's largest vulture to Bulgaria's Balkan Mountains after a 33-year absence as a breeding species.

🇯🇵 Japan · Niigata Prefecture Toki Conservation Fund Promotion Committee

Extinct in the Japanese wild since 2003, the crested ibis now numbers in the hundreds again on Sado Island thanks to captive breeding and farmer-led habitat recovery.

🇺🇿 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.

🇳🇨 New Caledonia · Association Bwärä Tortues Marines

A Bourail community association turns volunteer beach patrols into round-the-clock protection for the South Pacific's second-largest loggerhead turtle nesting site.

🇿🇼 Zimbabwe · CAMPFIRE Association

Since 1989, Zimbabwe's rural district councils have leased safari and hunting rights on communal land and funneled the proceeds straight back to the villages living alongside elephants and lions.

🇳🇦 Namibia · Cheetah Conservation Fund

Namibia-based nonprofit protecting the world's largest wild cheetah population through research, farmer outreach and guard dogs.

🇬🇳 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.

🇩🇲 Dominica · WildDominique

A homegrown band of Dominican ecologists and marine biologists running beach cleanups, endangered-reptile monitoring and environmental education across the Nature Isle.

🇲🇲 Myanmar · Friends of Wildlife (FOW)

A Yangon-based NGO works with villagers across Myanmar to protect elephants, Eld's deer and freshwater fish through community-run conservation zones and cleaner cookstoves.

🇨🇱 Chile · Sphenisco e.V.

A German-founded conservation group backs Chilean and Peruvian rescue centres, colony censuses and fishing communities working to save the Humboldt penguin from extinction.

🇷🇼 Rwanda · Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund

Continues Dian Fossey's legacy with daily monitoring that protects over half of Rwanda's mountain gorilla families.

🇿🇦 South Africa · Dyer Island Conservation Trust

Off Gansbaai's shark-rich waters, researchers tag great whites while rehabbers hand-raise stranded African penguin chicks for a colony fighting collapse.

🇪🇪 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.

🇫🇷 France · LPO (Ligue pour la Protection des Oiseaux)

Founded in 1912 to stop the slaughter of puffins in Brittany, LPO is now France's largest nature-protection association, sheltering wildlife across a 70,000-hectare refuge network.

🇪🇨 Ecuador · Fundación de Conservación Jocotoco

Buys and protects a network of reserves safeguarding a tenth of the world's bird species in Ecuador.

🇸🇹 São Tomé and Príncipe · Fundação Príncipe

A local foundation protects 31-million-year-old primary rainforest on Príncipe island while turning former turtle-egg poachers into nesting-beach rangers.

🇲🇽 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.

🇲🇿 Mozambique · Gorongosa Restoration Project

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

🇸🇷 Suriname · Green Heritage Fund Suriname

A Paramaribo nonprofit built Suriname's only wildlife hospital for sloths, anteaters and armadillos while tracking the country's threatened river dolphins.

🇱🇺 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.

🇧🇴 Bolivia · Asociación Armonía

A Bolivian NGO builds nest boxes across Beni's flooded savannas to pull the Critically Endangered Blue-throated Macaw back from likely extinction.

🇨🇺 Cuba · Ocean Doctor

A no-take marine reserve off Cuba's south coast now holds up to ten times more sharks and fish than the surrounding sea.

🇬🇷 Greece · ARCHELON, the Sea Turtle Protection Society of Greece

For over four decades, volunteers have walked Greece's beaches every summer night to protect the Mediterranean's largest loggerhead turtle nesting population.

🇹🇹 Trinidad and Tobago · Nature Seekers

A village conservation group founded in 1990 turned Matura Beach from a poaching hotspot into a stronghold protecting half of Trinidad's nesting leatherback turtles.

🇨🇾 Cyprus · Society for the Protection of Turtles (SPOT)

Volunteers formed in the 1980s now screen thousands of green and loggerhead turtle nests a season on North Cyprus's beaches, turning a near-silent coastline into one of the Mediterranean's nesting strongholds.

🇹🇼 Taiwan · Taiwan Black Bear Conservation Association

Taiwan's only nonprofit dedicated to its native black bear runs snare-removal, rescue, and education programs credited with helping the species rebound.

🇻🇪 Venezuela · Provita (Asociacion Civil Provita)

Venezuela's oldest conservation NGO protects one of the country's most important hawksbill turtle nesting beaches, turning former egg poachers into nest guardians in the remote fishing village of Macuro.

🇿🇼 Zimbabwe · Painted Dog Conservation

Anti-poaching rangers, a rehabilitation centre and a bush camp for local kids are keeping Zimbabwe's endangered painted dogs alive.

🇴🇲 Oman · Environment Authority – Oman

Oman's Environment Authority runs round-the-clock beach patrols on Masirah Island, home to one of the world's largest loggerhead turtle nesting populations.

🇵🇪 Peru · Junglekeepers

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

🇺🇾 Uruguay · Karumbé

Uruguay's only dedicated sea turtle NGO runs two rehabilitation centers on the Atlantic coast where stranded, plastic-choked and cold-stunned turtles get a second chance.

🇵🇦 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.

🇦🇴 Angola · Fundação Kissama

A Luanda-based conservation foundation and university biologists have turned former turtle hunters into nest guardians along Angola's coast.

🇵🇭 Philippines · Large Marine Vertebrates Research Institute Philippines (LAMAVE)

LAMAVE is a Philippine non-profit researching and protecting whale sharks, manta rays, turtles, and other marine megafauna nationwide.

🇨🇬 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.

🇲🇰 North Macedonia · Macedonian Ecological Society (MES)

North Macedonia's oldest environmental NGO runs the anti-poisoning patrols and village outreach keeping the country's last Griffon Vulture colonies alive.

🇲🇱 Mali · Mali Elephant Landscapes (WILD Foundation)

An all-Malian field team protects the world's last desert-adapted elephants and their 1,000km migration route by putting local communities in charge of natural resource rules.

🇦🇹 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.

🇧🇯 Benin · Nature Tropicale ONG

Benin's first IUCN-member NGO patrols the coast to rescue sea turtles, manatees and dolphins while running the country's first two marine protected areas.

🇨🇬 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.

🇬🇩 Grenada · Ocean Spirits Inc.

Since 1999 this Grenadian NGO has run the Caribbean's longest continuous leatherback turtle survey and driven beach egg poaching down to almost nothing.

🇦🇬 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.

🇳🇮 Nicaragua · Paso Pacifico

Former egg poachers turned community rangers now patrol Nicaragua's Pacific beaches every night to save critically endangered sea turtles.

🇨🇮 Ivory Coast · Wild Chimpanzee Foundation

Anti-poaching patrols and annual surveys are holding the line for one of West Africa's last viable wild chimpanzee populations in Taï National Park.

🇵🇬 Papua New Guinea · Piku Biodiversity Network

Papua New Guinean schoolkids-turned-rangers from seven tribes now guard the pig-nosed turtles their communities once hunted.

🇳🇿 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.

🇨🇻 Cape Verde · Project Biodiversity (Projeto Biodiversidade)

Every summer night on Sal Island, this Cabo Verdean NGO's patrols protect the world's third-largest loggerhead turtle nesting population from poachers and predators.

🇧🇷 Brazil · Fundação Pró-TAMAR

A national network of beach stations that turned Brazil's five sea turtle species from bycatch statistics into a 40-million-strong conservation success story.

🇨🇴 Colombia · Fundación Proyecto Tití

Protects the critically endangered cotton-top tamarin by conserving and reconnecting Colombia's tropical dry forest.

🇻🇨 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.

🇷🇺 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.

🇲🇾 Malaysia · HUTAN

A grassroots NGO run largely by the local Orang Sungai community has replanted over 246,000 trees to stitch Borneo's fragmented rainforest back together for wild orangutans.

🇮🇩 Indonesia · Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation

Indonesia's largest great-ape rescue network has released more than 900 rehabilitated orangutans back into protected Kalimantan rainforest.

🇮🇹 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.

🇮🇪 Ireland · Seal Rescue Ireland

The Republic of Ireland's only seal rehabilitation centre nurses sick, injured and orphaned seal pups back to health and returns them to the wild.

🇺🇸 United States · Save the Manatee Club

Co-founded by Jimmy Buffett in 1981, this Florida nonprofit funds manatee rescue, rehabilitation and the Adopt-A-Manatee programme that has made the species a global conservation icon.

🇦🇷 Argentina · Fundación Rewilding Argentina

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

🇺🇦 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.

🇿🇦 South Africa · SANCCOB

South Africa's seabird hospital has treated over 100,000 birds as the African penguin slides toward extinction.

🇼🇸 Samoa · Samoa Conservation Society

A Samoan NGO is regrowing native rainforest inside one of the country's oldest national parks while racing to save the last of the dodo-like manumea bird.

🇹🇭 Thailand · Save Elephant Foundation

Lek Chailert's Chiang Mai sanctuary network giving over 100 rescued elephants — freed from logging, riding, and circus work — a peaceful natural home.

🇻🇳 Vietnam · Save Vietnam's Wildlife (SVW)

Vietnam's leading pangolin rescue organization, which has saved over 1,650 pangolins from the illegal wildlife trade since 2014.

🇰🇪 Kenya · Save the Elephants

Pioneering elephant tracking from Samburu that helps secure a future for Africa's elephants.

🇲🇺 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.

🇵🇾 Paraguay · Guyra Paraguay

Founded to track Paraguay's vanishing birds, this NGO now owns and defends the largest surviving fragment of the Alto Paraná Atlantic Forest against fire, drug crops, and settlers.

🇨🇷 Costa Rica · Sea Turtle Conservancy

The world's oldest sea turtle conservation group, safeguarding turtles from its historic Tortuguero research station.

🇨🇳 China · Shan Shui Conservation Center

Shan Shui Conservation Center works with rural communities in western China to protect snow leopards, giant pandas, and their habitats.

🇱🇰 Sri Lanka · Sri Lanka Wildlife Conservation Society (SLWCS)

For three decades a Sri Lanka-based research team has been building electric fences, buses and beehives to keep both farmers and wild elephants safe in the Wasgamuwa region.

🇲🇹 Malta · Sharklab-Malta

Sharklab-Malta rescues shark eggs left orphaned by fishing, hatches the pups in captivity, and releases them back into the Mediterranean.

🇰🇪 Kenya · Sheldrick Wildlife Trust

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

🇲🇳 Mongolia · Snow Leopard Trust

Community-based conservation protecting the elusive snow leopard across the mountains of Central Asia.

🇫🇮 Finland · Finnish Association for Nature Conservation (Suomen luonnonsuojeluliitto)

Volunteers plow artificial snowbanks and hand out seal-safe fish traps to pull Lake Saimaa's endemic ringed seal back from the edge.

🇸🇱 Sierra Leone · Tacugama Chimpanzee Sanctuary

In the hills above Freetown, a sanctuary founded after one rescued chimp tied to a tree has grown into Sierra Leone's front line against the illegal wildlife trade.

🇵🇫 French Polynesia · Te Mana O Te Moana

A Moorea-based clinic has nursed hundreds of injured sea turtles back to health and taught tens of thousands of Polynesian schoolchildren to protect the ocean.

🇵🇬 Papua New Guinea · Tenkile Conservation Alliance

In Papua New Guinea's remote Torricelli Mountains, a community-run alliance turned a hunting moratorium into a tripling of the critically endangered tenkile tree kangaroo.

🇿🇦 South Africa · Transfrontier Africa NPC

South Africa's Black Mambas patrol Greater Kruger unarmed, using visible presence and community roots to push rhino poaching toward zero.

🇮🇷 Iran · Iranian Cheetah Society

Iran's oldest still-active wildlife NGO runs government-sanctioned camera-trap monitoring across the country's desert reserves to save the fewer than 30 Asiatic cheetahs left on Earth.

🇳🇴 Norway · Norwegian Orca Survey

A small non-profit based in Andenes has built one of the world's longest continuous datasets on killer whales since 2014.

🇵🇱 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.

🇨🇱 Chile · Fundación MERI

A Patagonian research foundation's whale science helped Chile create a 100,000-hectare marine park protecting one of the Southern Hemisphere's last blue whale feeding grounds.

🇵🇪 Peru · ProDelphinus

A Lima-based marine biology NGO teaches Peru's small-scale fishers to safely release sea turtles caught in their nets and lines, turning bycatch victims into survivors.

🇻🇺 Vanuatu · Vanuatu Environmental Science Society (VESS)

Volunteer divers photographing sea slugs and dugongs are helping Vanuatu chart marine life it has never formally recorded.

🇸🇰 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.

🇰🇲 Comoros · Association pour le Développement Socio-Économique d'Itsamia (ADSEI)

A village association on Mohéli turned a beach once fouled by poached turtle carcasses into one of the Southwest Indian Ocean's best-protected green turtle nesting sites.

🇨🇩 DR Congo · Virunga Foundation

Africa's oldest national park protects a third of the world's mountain gorillas while its hydropower plants create thousands of jobs for peace.

🇰🇭 Cambodia · Wildlife Alliance

Wildlife Alliance funds ranger patrols that protect Cambodia's Cardamom Rainforest, one of Southeast Asia's last intact forest landscapes.

🇻🇳 Vietnam · Wildlife At Risk (WAR)

Wildlife At Risk rescues, rehabilitates, and releases endangered Vietnamese species confiscated from illegal wildlife trade.

🇨🇷 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.

🇸🇴 Somalia · Somalia Earth Volunteers (SEV)

A youth-led Puntland nonprofit combines tree planting with frontline research to save Somalia's most endangered mammal, the Somali wild ass.

🇿🇲 Zambia · Conservation South Luangwa

A Zambian-led NGO fields community scouts, a K9 anti-poaching unit and vets to protect 1.4 million hectares of the Luangwa Valley.