Conservation / Community / Biodiversity / Sustainability
Save Your World Foundation Mission
The Save Your World Foundation is a U.S. based non-profit whose mission is to ensure the long-term protection of globally significant areas through financial and technical support of incentive-based conservation agreements. Established in early 2010 by Scott Cecil, a businessman and philanthropist and Dr. Richard Rice, long time chief economist at Conservation International, the Foundation aims to serve as a bridge between conservation funding and grassroots project implementers who might otherwise have great difficulty in successfully attracting, negotiating and managing project finance.
Our Approach to Conservation: Incentive-based Agreements
 Effective protection of biodiversity requires strategies that make conservation economically viable and attractive to resource owners. Incentive-based conservation agreements are a key mechanism to address this need. First piloted in the developing world by Conservation International, conservation agreements are transparent, fairly negotiated agreements in which resource owners commit to protecting specific habitats or species in exchange for a steady stream of concrete benefits. The type of benefits provided vary but may include technical assistance, support for social services, employment in resource protection, or direct cash payments.
Save Your World Foundation has adopted the conservation agreement approach as a model for all of the projects included in its portfolio. Conservation agreements position biodiversity preservation as a practical and competitive alternative to destructive resource development by linking global support for biodiversity with the people in a position to provide its conservation, in effect creating a new market for direct investment in conservation itself.
In Brief
The Save Your World Foundation is the only non-profit devoted entirely to supporting on-the-ground conservation agreements in developing countries. Our focus is on serving a select portfolio of world-class projects.
- Providing technical support and project oversight
- Monitoring conservation outcomes and agreement compliance
- Providing funders with assurance of a stable and reliable investment context
- Ensuring long-term financial sustainability by hosting project-level endowments
Efficient and Effective Conservation
Under incentive-based conservation agreements national authorities or local resource owners commit to protecting specific habitats or species in exchange for a steady stream of benefits. By making conservation itself a source of economic development, such agreements offer one of the few effective options for protecting biodiversity outside of national parks and other traditional protected areas.
How You Can Help
Being “green” is too often defined in terms of doing less “bad”—engaging in less consumption, pollution, say, rather than any amount of “good” in terms of protecting species and habitats. For plants and animals that depend on specific areas for survival, this distinction is of critical importance because unless protected these areas are quite simply at risk of being developed, and in the end that means biodiversity loses. The Save Your World Foundation offers supporters the rare opportunity to directly participate in doing “good” by funding effective, site-based agreements protecting some of the most important conservation resources on the planet.
World Class Projects
- Tetepare, Solomon Islands, the Last Wild Island – support for local customary landowners, protection of the largest uninhabited island in the Pacific
- Predator Compensation Fund, Kenya – vital financial support for Maasai herdsmen, the most effective lion conservation in Africa
- Upper Essequibo Conservation Concession, Guyana – path-breaking conservation lease agreement, protection for 200,000 acres of pristine rainforest
- Phoenix Islands Protected Area, Kiribati – the largest marine reserve on Earth, a practical national alternative to destructive fishing
- Uaxactun, Guatemala – community rainforest protection in the heart of the Maya Biosphere Reserve
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