* Any views expressed in this article are those of the author and not of Thomson Reuters Foundation.
World Wildlife Fund’s big shift began in May 2012 with an eye-opening report card.
The Living Planet Report, a biennial snapshot of the state of the planet that we use to guide our work, came out and the findings were dismal. It told the story of an unfolding ecological catastrophe. All the trend lines on issues we cherish, from biodiversity to food security to climate change, pointed in the wrong direction. In the fight for our planet’s future, it was clear that we had won some important conservation battles, but in other key areas we were falling behind.
WWF has much to be proud of. For more than 50 years we’ve built a track record of saving wildlife, wild places and communities in places like Nepal, Namibia and Brazil. But the Living Planet Report was a stark wakeup call. Our impact did not match the scale of the problems. We knew we had to rethink our way of working.
We flipped the switch in December 2012. We launched an ambitious effort to shift the way we work and think. Innovation lies at the heart of our new strategy – and it stretched us beyond our comfort zone. Real change came with some pain points, including the elimination of one hundred positions in our Washington, DC office so we could shift capacity to other parts of the world and free up funds for innovation.
Now we’re embracing a pipeline of rapid-fire ideas and learning how to quickly apply lessons learned. We’re doing it with an eye toward having much greater impact in a shorter timeframe. And we’re looking outside our organization for inspiration – drawing from institutions like Google, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Procter & Gamble.
When dealing with big global issues as daunting as climate change, resource scarcity or a rampant poaching crisis, it’s too easy to slip into a cynical mindset. But fortunately, we’re blessed with smart people with an abiding sense of optimism. We’re giving them and their ideas room to unfold and grow and entertaining possibilities we might have once dismissed. The best ideas are being turned into workable concepts that can be launched, tested and eventually scaled. Not all of them will work – but the ideas that do succeed will have powerful, far-reaching impact.
One of the first of new ideas involved a partnership with Google to develop and scale new tools to combat wildlife crime. In 2012, Google granted WWF a $5 million Global Impact Award to test disruptive anti-poaching technologies including remote aerial survey systems, wildlife tagging technology and ranger patrolling guided by ground-breaking analytical software. Testing and scaling up this arsenal of technology will give us a fighting chance to stop the slaughter of rhinos, tigers and elephants across Africa and Asia.
In May of 2014 we worked with an unlikely group of Wall Street partners to launch another new initiative. The $215 million Project Finance for Permanence will ensure long-term protection of the world’s largest network of protected areas – 150 million acres of Brazilian Amazon rainforest. We’re now taking this idea to Bhutan, Peru and elsewhere to secure permanent conservation of vast swaths of forests.
To keep the ideas flowing, we recently created an annual $10 million innovation fund to provide seed capital for the most promising initiatives.
Maintaining this shift in our organization will require conviction and a steady stream of gut-checking and measurement against our conservation goals. But if we stay the course, I believe the 2016 Living Planet Reportwill begin to tell a more hopeful story.
Carter Roberts is President and CEO of the World Wildlife Fund – US.
