Wildlife Conservation Society
The Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) achieves innovative, impactful results in its work to save wildlife and wild places.
WCS teams manage country and regional programs in more than 50 countries and across thematic initiatives, including being the largest presence of any conservation organization to counter wildlife trafficking. The WCS is well-known for zoo-based conservation at its five urban parks in New York City: the Bronx Zoo, New York Aquarium, Central Park Zoo, Queens Zoo, and Prospect Park Zoo.
Since 1976, the Foundation’s $29 million in grants have supported WCS’s global engagement with governments and communities to protect ecosystems that are critical to conservation, combat wildlife trafficking, and resolve conflicts at the intersection of people and wildlife with socially and environmentally sustainable solutions. The Foundation has also supported educational programs to advance conservation and anti-poaching efforts in the Congo to protect gorillas. Starr also supported the C.V. Starr Conservation Theater in the Congo Gorilla Forest exhibit, which showcases WCS’s gorilla conservation programs, and highlights for visitors the connection between the Bronx Zoo’s world-class exhibits and ongoing conservation work in the field.
C.V. Starr Tiger Conservation Fellowship
In the words of the Wildlife Conservation Society, “The majestic tiger, once the top predator of nearly all of Asia’s vast tropical and temperate forests, today faces a persistent suite of nearly overwhelming dangers in a vastly diminished range. Tigers are killed in huge numbers for their skins and bones or in retaliation for conflict with humans, their prey are killed by skilled hunters to feed an insatiable local luxury market for ‘exotic’ bushmeat, and their remaining forest habitats are relentlessly converted to human uses.”— Wildlife: Tigers, Wildlife Conservation Society
The twin crises of poaching and diminishing habitats have endangered the world’s tigers. In 2002, The Starr Foundation endowed the C.V. Starr Tiger Conservation Fellowship, which is awarded to outstanding WCS Graduate Scholars from Asian tiger–range countries engaging in tiger studies and/or conservation. Three additional grants totaling $750,000 were made in 2017–2019 to support tiger conservation. WCS takes a science-based approach to monitoring tiger and prey populations, developing protected areas and corridors, reducing human-tiger conflict, bolstering law enforcement, and advocating for tiger conservation within local communities and with regional and national governments.
Foundation funding has also included support for the C.V. Starr Tiger Valley Viewing Pavilion within the Tiger Mountain exhibit at the Bronx Zoo.
Other funding highlights include the following:
- A $20 million Starr Foundation gift helped create the C.V. Starr Science Campus at the Bronx Zoo, which is home to researchers, conservationists, and others working on WCS’s worldwide conservation efforts.
- In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, WCS applied its scientific expertise of zoonotic pathogens (infectious diseases passed from wildlife to humans) to raise awareness regarding future pandemics. The Starr Foundation contributed to WCS’s Wildlife Trade Action Plan to strengthen policies that prohibit the commercial trade of wild birds and mammals, improve wildlife supply-chain surveillance, and build capabilities to end wildlife trafficking in Asian countries.