Leonardo DiCaprio and Jeff Bezos are putting $200 million behind an effort to pull 100 of the world's most threatened species back from extinction. The initiative, called the Phoenix Species Project, was announced on August 4, 2026, by the Bezos Earth Fund and Re:wild, the conservation organization DiCaprio co-founded Reuters.

The money is described as the largest single philanthropic commitment dedicated exclusively to recovering critically endangered species across every category of life — mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish, invertebrates, and plants. The 100 species on the list come from 30 countries. Among them: the golden-crowned sifaka lemur of Madagascar, the Visayan warty pig of the Philippines, the Malayan pangolin, the Charco Azul pupfish, and the Torrey Pine tree native to Southern California Bezos Earth Fund.

The full $200 million comes as a gift from the Bezos Earth Fund, the philanthropic vehicle Bezos launched in 2020 to fund climate and nature solutions. DiCaprio confirmed in a statement that the funding was made possible by what he called a transformative gift from the fund Town & Country. Lauren Sánchez Bezos, vice chair of the Bezos Earth Fund, issued her own statement backing the project. The Associated Press reported the launch as a joint effort by foundations tied to both men Associated Press via U.S. News.

The money will flow to local and international conservation partners around the world. Recovery strategies include captive breeding programs, disease management, and habitat restoration. In plain terms: breed animals in protected settings, fight the pathogens wiping them out, and fix the places they live so they can survive on their own again.

DiCaprio has spent more than two decades funding conservation through Re:wild and its predecessor organization, focusing on species protection, ocean preservation, and indigenous-led land stewardship. Bezos committed $10 billion through the Earth Fund by 2030, spread across climate, nature, and food-systems work. The Phoenix Species Project sits where those two portfolios overlap: a single fund, a single goal, and a list of species that without intervention may not outlast the decade.

For the golden-crowned sifaka, a lemur fewer than 10,000 of which remain in fragmented Madagascar forests, the project means funding for the kind of intensive protection that has pulled other lemurs back from the edge. For the Visayan warty pig, once thought extinct in the wild across most of its Philippine range, it means breeding programs that have already produced small reintroduced populations — and now have the money to scale them. The Malayan pangolin, the most trafficked mammal on Earth, gets resources for both habitat protection and the anti-poaching enforcement that its survival depends on.

The project's name borrows from the phoenix, the mythical bird that rises from its own ashes. Whether 100 species can do the same is a question the next several years of fieldwork will answer.