Leonardo DiCaprio donates $1m to save lions, after giving $1m to Hurricane Harvey appeal

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LEONARDO DICAPRIO has shown he is the real Lion King with a million dollar pledge to protect Africa’s iconic big cats.

The Oscar winning actor is providing the money – worth £743,000 – through his charitable foundation for a wide range of projects to save lions and their wild landscapes.

To highlight the plight facing lions in an age when their numbers have crashed to as few 20,000 individuals, the Hollywood superstar has also narrated a poignant short film.

The video – posted on the Lion Recovery Fund (LRF) website, an organisation the star’s foundation helped create – gives an agonising insight into the threats faced by these apex predators but with hope for their future.

News of the huge grant was announced by the Wildlife Conservation Network, the organisation the actor’s foundation worked with to create the LRF in order to concentrate funding on the best ideas to restore lion numbers and save their hunting ranges.

"With less space, conflicts between lions and local communities are on the rise and, where there is conflict, the lion always loses."

Leonardo DiCaprio

The million-dollar donation is part of a $20 million (£14.66 million) grant portfolio from the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation to more than 100 organisations revealed this week during a climate conference with former US Secretary of State John Kerry.

DiCaprio’s commitment to saving lions is spelt out in the short film he has narrated for the LRF in which he outlines the big cats’ plight – and hopes for their future.

He said: “The world’s lion population is in trouble. Over the last 25 years we have lost half of the wild lions that ranged across the African continent. The vast landscapes where they once roamed are rapidly disappearing as we take over their habitat. With less space, conflicts between lions and local communities are on the rise and, where there is conflict, the lion always loses.

“Even in Africa’s parks, where lions should be thriving, lions struggle to find enough food as parks are emptied of wildlife for the commercial trade of bushmeat, killing both predators and prey alike.”

Yet he says the solution to saving lions is within our grasp by investing in projects that connect and protect Africa’s wildlife parks and reserves. “We can transform these landscapes into places where lions and wildlife recover and people can thrive,” he adds.

Explaining the importance of funding lion conservation, Justin Winters, executive director of the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation, says: “Lions are a keystone species and play a critical role in African ecosystems. Recovering them means the protection and restoration of Africa’s extraordinary biodiversity that drives a $34 billion (£25.2 billion) tourism economy.

“Investment in lion protection and recovery preserves this iconic symbol of Africa’s ecology and its economies.”

As news of the funding from the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation was being announced, the LRF unveiled a series of new lion recovery projects in Malawi, Mozambique, Tanzania, and Zambia.

These will see: African Park Network reintroducing lions to Malawi’s Liwonde National Park; the establishment of a lion protection unit with new rangers tackling the bushmeat harvest in Mozambique’s Limpopo National Park; conservationists expanding a community project near Tanzania’s Ruaha National Park to train local communities to use camera traps to monitor lions and other wildlife and supporting wildlife crime prevention in Zambia by educating people about the negative impacts of eating illegal bushmeat.

Jeffrey “Jefe” Parrish, the vice president for Conservation at the Wildlife Conservation Network, said the organisation was honoured to be driving philanthropic investments to the efforts of conservationists working on the ground to help lions and their landscapes.

He said: “If existing parks and reserves were properly resourced and managed, and if local communities were supported, Africa’s lion population could increase to more than three to four times its current size. The Lion Recovery Fund exists to fuel the best efforts by a coalition of conservationists to make this happen.”


Source: http://www.express.co.uk/news/natur...io-Nature-lions-Hurricane-Harvey-conservation
 
Well good for Leo! Hope the money actually makes it to where it should go.
 

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