‘We cannot replace USAID, but we can do big things’: conservation plots a future without American money

The Trump administration’s cuts to biodiversity funding have imperiled species, habitats and the people who defend both. Now the world is seeking a new way forward 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 fore...

By Michelle Nijhuis