On 22 January 2024, at the inauguration of the current Liberian president, Joseph Boakai, the US-based Liberian poet Patricia Jabbeh Wesley paid tribute to the west African nation’s tropical forests – one of the places where, she said, “our fathers came / centuries ago, and planted our umbilical cords / deep in the soil”.

The forests of Liberia are among the most diverse on the planet, home not only to humans and their ancestral ties but also to rare species such as forest elephants, pygmy hippopotamuses and western chimpanzees. They are also chronically threatened by industrial development, including illegal logging and mining.

For nearly a decade, the Society for the Conservation of Nature of Liberia (SCNL) has recruited and trained a corps of up to 80 eco-guards to help protect the forest. The eco-guards, all of whom live in forest communities, patrol for signs of illegal activity and share their findings with rangers from nearby parks and forests. The work carries risks, from encounters with venomous snakes and charging elephants to the threat of violence from poachers, but eco-guards earn a salary that has enabled some to fund their children’s educations and purchase land to build homes.

In late January 2025, the SCNL learned that USAID, the eco-guards’ primary financial backer, was being dismantled by the Trump administration and that funding had been abruptly suspended. The SCNL programme manager, Michael E Taire, a Liberian who lives in the capital, Monrovia, spent several days travelling over rough forest roads to break the news to the eco-guards, who were shocked and distraught. In one forest community, a young woman told him that if SCNL could not pay her and her fellow guards, they would have to support their families by “doing what they used to do” – which, in her case, meant illegally hunting forest animals.

Most of the public attention on the demise of USAID has focused on its consequences for human health, and for good reason. USAID support for HIV/Aids treatment, malaria control and other initiatives has saved 91 million lives over the past 20 years, according to one analysis, and the cuts are estimated to have already led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, the majority of them children.

Liberia, which was one of the first countries to receive USAID support, lost an estimated $290m (£215m) for local schools and clinics, ambulances, medical training and other basic health and education needs in 2025. More than 2.5% of the country’s gross national income came from USAID – the highest percentage in the world.

These tragedies overshadow another great loss. USAID was not only the world’s leading source of health aid but also one of the world’s largest backers of biodiversity protection. The agency oversaw and funded efforts to combat wildlife trafficking, protect valuable habitats and support community-led conservation – to defend the places where, as Jabbeh Wesley describes, many Liberians feel a physical connection to their ancestors and the land.

The dismantling of USAID, along with the suspension of international conservation grants from other US agencies, has threatened not only species and habitats but also the people who defend wildlife around the world. Park rangers and wildlife crime officers lost funding for salaries, training and equipment.

Efforts to address the root causes of wildlife trafficking across the globe were axed, as was USAID’s forest-protection programme in the Congo basin of central Africa, one of the agency’s largest and most enduring endeavours. Conservation organisations large and small lost tens of millions of dollars, forcing some to function with a fraction of the resources they had expected and others to shut down programmes entirely.

David Kaimowitz, a longtime advocate of community-led conservation in the Amazon basin and Central America, puts it bluntly: “We’re talking about an end to a whole era of conservation.”

A year later, global leaders and local people are charting a new course – and planning for a future without US support.

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It was in the late 1980s, after scientists coined the term “biodiversity” to draw attention to the costs of species extinction, that the US Congress began to dedicate a portion of USAID funding to saving the planet’s biodiversity. In the 1990s, the US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) and the US Forest Service (USFS) followed suit by formalising their own international conservation programmes.

USAID had previously paid little attention to environmental concerns, supporting high-input agriculture, large hydropower dams and other initiatives with some immediate benefits but often grievous long-term effects for both people and the environment. Conservation groups in the US and Europe, for their part, had pushed to create national parks and reserves in Africa and other parts of the world often without regard for the people whose lives were disrupted or displaced.

“When I started with the agency, people still thought that to do conservation we should educate local communities,” says Cynthia Gill, who spent more than 30 years working for USAID and headed its biodiversity and forestry work before being placed on leave in early 2025. Gill says she and her colleagues tried to listen instead. As one of USAID’s leaders of Parks in Peril – which between 1990 and 2007 strengthened the management of about 45 protected areas in Latin America and the Caribbean – she strove to involve local organisations and communities that had often been excluded from park management.

Thanks to bipartisan support for conservation in Congress, the money dedicated to biodiversity programmes grew slowly but steadily through the 1990s and early 2000s. USAID invested heavily in forest conservation in the Congo basin and supported the creation of a national park system in Gabon. In Colombia, it funded an ambitious initiative to promote ecotourism in six regions scarred by the country’s civil war; in Nepal, a nationwide community forestry network was bolstered.

USAID also helped conserve tigers in Bangladesh and combat wildlife trafficking in dozens of countries and collaborated with the Jane Goodall Institute to protect chimpanzee habitats and improve human livelihoods in Tanzania. It invested hundreds of millions of dollars in the work of large international conservation organisations such as the Wildlife Conservation Society, the World Wildlife Fund and the Nature Conservancy.

Its work was not without critics, who accused it of bureaucratic inefficiencies and for collaborating too closely – or not closely enough – with government officials. But the US government’s biodiversity initiatives led to measurable gains for species and ecosystems around the world.

By the 2020s, Congress was approving more than $300m for USAID biodiversity programmes each year. International conservation work by the USFWS and USFS, though always more modest, also grew; in 2024, these agencies received about $25m and $20m respectively for their international programmes. While these figures are tiny relative to the national budget, they were enough to make the US a keystone species in international conservation.

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A bar chart showing how much funding the US gave to each region in 2024

During the Biden administration, USAID’s director, Samantha Power, led the creation of a far-reaching new biodiversity policy for the agency, one that emphasised locally led development and stewardship, climate resilience and a fuller incorporation of biodiversity protection into its work. The policy was released in December 2024 – just weeks before President Donald Trump issued an executive order freezing all federal spending on foreign development assistance. Soon after, USAID officially closed.

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So far, those on the frontlines of conservation are paying the highest price for USAID’s demise. Like the eco-guards in Liberia, park rangers and wildlife crime officers in Malawi, Tanzania, Vietnam and elsewhere have lost their livelihoods.

It is too soon to measure the long-term effects of the cuts on efforts to reduce poaching, trafficking and habitat loss. For example, in South Africa, the Endangered Wildlife Trust lost about $1.2mfor its projects combating rhino poaching and monitoring Africa’s threatened vulture species. The continent-wide decline of vultures has led to the accumulation of carrion and food waste and may be accelerating the spread of disease.

Kishaylin Chetty, head of sustainability for the trust, says that while international and national donors stepped in to ensure it did not have to immediately lay off staff, local groups funded by USAID that had partnered with it were less fortunate. “Certainly, the impact that those [groups] and ourselves were trying to achieve has been set back,” he says. “It’s been set back a number of years, and it will be a while before we can get that traction back.”

Diane Russell, an American anthropologist who has worked for USAID in the Congo basin since the 1980s, says the agency helped draw international attention and funding to the region’s remarkably rich remaining forests, which are home to mountain gorillas and forest elephants. It also enabled conservation to continue through extraordinarily difficult conditions.

In the late 1990s, for example, when the eastern half of the Democratic Republic of the Congo was occupied by forces from Rwanda and Uganda, Russell persuaded Congolese officials to allow USAID and the United Nations Foundation to continue supporting protected areas in the war zone. That was only possible, she says, “because I had USAID at my back”.

Now back in the US, Russell is trying to salvage decades of data, while also keeping in touch with her former Congolese colleagues and helping them find new jobs when she can. “When I think of the wreckage that this left behind,” she says, “the wreckage of people’s lives and their careers and their families – sometimes it’s just overwhelming.”

Yet even as conservationists mourn, says Kevin Starr, of the philanthropic Mulago Foundation, they should be alert for opportunities. “The callous glee with which [the Trump] administration choked off aid is something I will never forgive or forget,” he writes in an essay published in spring 2025.

But, he continues, the era of “Big Aid” is over, and funders and advocates must adapt. “Imagining a development future without Big Aid is hence the wisest – and paradoxically the most optimistic and creative approach we can take.”

While the Trump administration’s cuts have crippled many conservation organisations, others are finding ways to carry on. In August, the SCNL secured short-term funding from the Rainforest Trust, a US-based conservation group, to restart its eco-guard patrols. The Endangered Wildlife Trust and several other groups contacted for this story say existing donors have increased their gifts and that the news of the cuts has attracted new supporters.

“It’s been infuriating and damaging, but by no means catastrophic,” says Matt Clark, executive director of Nature and Culture International. His organisation lost more than $2m of USAID and USFWS money for conservation in the Ecuadorian and Peruvian Andes but hopes to make up at least some of those losses with European government grants.

Other groups formerly funded by the US have also received, or hope to receive, funding from Germany, the United Kingdom, or other European governments. Norway, a longtime supporter of international forest conservation, announced a $3bn contribution to the newly established Tropical Forests Forever Facility in November.

Enormous gaps remain, however, and the alternative sources of funding may not last: European and UK governments are widely expected to reduce support for international conservation as they come under pressure to bolster their military capacity. US philanthropists may be less willing to give abroad because they are besieged with competing appeals for help at home.

James Deutsch, chief executive of the Rainforest Trust, suggests many of the effects of the cuts are not yet visible. “But five or 10 years from now, you’ll be starting to see them,” he says, “and people will say, ‘how could we have destroyed the capacity for longer-term success?’”

Still, bipartisan support for international conservation persists in Congress. Just before Joe Biden left office in early 2025, Congress created the US Foundation for International Conservation, which contributes $1 for every $2 raised by private donors and has so far evaded the administration’s foreign aid chainsaw. In the summer of 2025, Congress authorised up to $100m for the fund during this fiscal year. In early January 2026, Congress also pushed back on the administration’s proposal to eliminate the international programmes of USFWS and USFS, funding both at or near 2024 levels.

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Meanwhile, in July 2025, two former USAID staffers, Hadas Kushnir and Monica Bansal, launched an effort to collect and preserve the agency’s accumulated climate and conservation knowledge. With the help of a grant from the Navigation Fund, a US nonprofit organisation, they have re-established contact with almost 600 former USAID employees, contractors and grantees in 65 countries.

They are now working to identify the most promising of the agency’s interrupted environmental projects – those that “still have boots on the ground, are viable, are high quality and have momentum”, Kushnir says. They then match these projects with private and public funders able to support them.

One of Kushnir’s interviewees was Dida Fayo, who lost his job with the Northern Rangelands Trust in October 2025. Last April, fearing what was coming, Fayo founded a new organisation, Asal Research & Resilience Programme, dedicated to community-led climate resilience in arid and semi-arid regions. Fayo is not yet making a salary as the organisation’s director, but he is determined to continue serving his home region.

“We cannot replace USAID, but we can do big things, because we, the locals, were the engine behind what USAID was doing in this region,” he says. “We have the mind, we have the goodwill, we have the integrity and we mean well for this region, despite all its challenges.”

A longer version of this story was originally published on bioGraphic, an online magazine powered by the California Academy of Sciences