2020 Strategy

Our Goal

WCS: 2020 represents our most careful thinking on our identity and purpose as a conservation organization, what we want to achieve, and which strengths and assets will help us have the most impact. We begin with this goal:

To conserve the world's largest wild places in 14 priority regions, home to more than 50 percent of the world's biodiversity.

"Never before have we known so well
The intricate balance of species and systems
All life depends on."

OUR WORK AROUND THE GLOBE

As we move toward 2020 and beyond, we seek to conserve the world's largest and most ecologically intact wild places. These places are home to more than 50 percent of the world's biodiversity and sustain over 300 million of the world's poorest people.

We have selected 14 priority regions that will focus our field effort on landscapes and seascapes that:

• Comprise the most intact natural area
• Represent Earth's biodiversity
• Are resilient to climate change or provide opportunities for species to adapt to it
• Enable us to have the greatest impact

WCS landscapes include more than 10 percent of the world's intact forest and harbor over 40 percent of all known mammal, bird, and amphibian species. In a sample of marine taxa, WCS seascapes were found to harbor more than 12,000 known species, close to 90 percent of all coral diversity, and over half the world's species of sharks, rays, and marine mammals.

We will also focus on the conservation of six global priority animal species groups based on the following criteria:

• Are deeply valued for themselves
• Are critical to the ecological functioning of our landscapes and seascapes
• Are threatened
• Are powerful flagships for the conservation of our priority regions and for addressing critical conservation issues globally

Our work will reverse the decline of six priority groups of species—elephants, apes, big cats, sharks & rays, whales & dolphins, and tortoises & fresh-water turtles—that are flagships for those wild places and for critical issues facing wildlife globally.

The 14 regions where we will focus our efforts:

1. Arctic Beringia (Arctic coasts and seas of Alaska, Western Canada, and Eastern Russia)
2. Rocky Mountain West (from southern Canada to the U.S.–Mexico borderlands)
3. North American Boreal Forests (boreal forests, mountains, and peatlands in Canada and Alaska)
4. Mesoamerica & Western Caribbean (Forests, coasts, and coral reefs in Belize, Cuba, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua)
5. Andes, Amazon, & Orinoco (Forests, grasslands, and wetlands of Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Venezuela)
6. Patagonia (Forests, steppe, coasts and seas of Argentina and Chile)
7. Central Africa & Gulf of Guinea (Forests and coast, including Burundi, Cameroon, Democratic Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Nigeria, Republic of Congo, Rwanda, and Uganda)
8. Eastern Africa, Madagascar, & Western Indian Ocean (Savannahs, forests, and woodlands of Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Mozambique; and coasts and coral reefs of Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique, and Madagascar)
9. Temperate Asian Mountains & Grasslands (Grasslands, forests, and mountains of central and northeast Asia)
10. South Asia & Bay of Bengal (Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, and Nepal)
11. Greater Mekong (Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, and Vietnam)
12. Southeast Asian Archipelago (Forests, coasts, and reefs of Indonesia and Malaysia)
13. Melanesia ("Ridge to reef" in Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, and Vanuatu)
14. Sudano-Sahel (Savannas, forests, and wetlands of Central Africa)

Outcome:

By 2020, we will help conserve wild nature in 14 of the world's most important terrestrial and marine regions while reversing the decline of six global priority species groups that are flagships for wild places and for critical issues facing wildlife globally.

To conserve these wild places and wildlife species and to leverage our impact beyond these landscapes, seascapes, and species populations, we will partner with governments, local communities, and other organizations working in these 14 regions and on these six species groups pioneering approaches to conservation and catalyzing and coordinating concerted action.

Between now and 2020, WCS will:

Support the establishment and management of protected areas, helping nations fulfill their commitment to the Aichi Targets under the Convention on Biological Diversity that protected area coverage be expanded to 17 percent of land and 10 percent of the ocean.

Work with governments and communities to effectively manage and conserve the landscapes and seascapes in which we work. We will seek to ensure that within each of these WCS landscapes and seascapes:

• Populations of indicator species (including members of global priority species groups) are stable or increasing.
• The extent of intact habitat is stable or increasing.
• Help monitor at least 80 percent of the protected areas where we work annually.
• State or local agencies and community organizations show improved capacity to manage natural resource use sustainably within their jurisdictions.
• Livelihoods of communities are stable or improving.

Seek to ensure that elephants, apes, big cats, sharks & rays, whales & dolphins, and tortoises and freshwater turtles achieve measurable progress toward recovery and long-term viability of populations in WCS landscapes and seascapes and across their range and highlight this effort in our New York City parks.

Focus our zoo and aquarium collections on species that are at risk in nature, that have ties with Association of Zoos and Aquarium (AZA) conservation programs.

Outcome:

By 2020, we will build and activate a conservation movement—a diverse, influential, and enduring global community that is invested and empowered to save wildlife and wild places.

We will build a substantial network of supporters and advocates by broadening our audiences and deepening our impact. To do this, we will grow the number of visitors to our zoos and aquarium in New York; increase our education impact and reach within our NYC parks and in our global priority regions. We will increase the audiences for all our digital platforms and our earned media; and expand our reach by partnering with government, business and civil society, including: NGOs, zoos and aquariums, informal science education and cultural institutions.

Between now and 2020, WCS will:

• Grow attendance to WCS's zoos and aquarium and global parks.
• Complete a renovation and expansion to transform the New York Aquarium into a memorable and impactful experience that meaningfully connects visitors to the oceans.
• Measure and improve the impact of the visitor experience to our parks and aquarium.
• Continue to develop targeted education programs to engage communities in New York City and the priority landscapes and seascapes where we work.
• Establish partnerships with governments, businesses, civil society, and other zoos, aquariums, botanical gardens, and museums in the U.S. and abroad to ignite a movement of 5 million.
• Develop strategic partnerships with media that enable our conservation efforts to reach a global audience.

BUILDING A STRONGER PLATFORM

We will also seek to build a stronger institutional platform to support our conservation programs and help build the capacity of our partner institutions in the places where we work.

By 2020, WCS will ensure that it has:

• A diverse, passionately committed team that continuously learns and improves, leverages each other's contributions, embraces WCS's values, and are empowered to work collectively to achieve WCS's mission.
• A taxonomically diverse and exciting animal collection in our zoos and aquarium, focused on population sustainability and closely aligned with AZA conservation programs and Global Conservation Program initiatives.
• Dynamic, immersive, multi-species exhibits in our zoos and aquarium.
• Recognition as a leading and respected voice on conservation through effective internal and external communications and branding.
• Strong management systems to support the achievement of organizational goals.
• A reduction in the environmental impact of our operations.
• Sector-wide leadership in applying technology to enhance our strategies.
• A business model that will allow us to increase our annual earned and raised revenues.

LEVERAGE PARTNERSHIPS AND PUBLIC POLICY

Recognizing that our mission and goals are ambitious, we will work to leverage our resources to have a greater impact through partnerships and greater involvement in public policy.

We will identify strategic partners related to the priority places and issues described in this plan and work to develop long-term strategic partnerships with relevant organizations, governments, and institutions to help us improve our impact significantly.

Between now and 2020, WCS will:

• Establish Science for Nature and People (SNAP), in collaboration with TNC and NCEAS to develop analysis, synthesis, and models that will be used to inform policies and scale up practices for conservation.
• Establish a Partners in Field Conservation (PFC) program through collaboration and partnerships with other zoos, aquariums, and botanical gardens.
• Build our SMART partnership to strengthen the management of protected areas.
• Expand the Health & Ecosystems: Analysis of Linkages (HEAL) program, with its focus on the critical importance of landscape and seascape conservation to public health, with Harvard University and other key partners.
• Develop a new initiative to examine the relationship between cities and wildlife, building on our work in New York City and expanding into other cities.
• Develop a network with other NGO's, businesses, governments and civil society to combat illegal wildlife trafficking, with an initial emphasis on elephants and ivory
• Develop a partnership with the National Geographic Society to expand our reach through multiple platforms and engage people in our mission and goals

We will strengthen our involvement in public policy at the local, national, and international levels to have a greater impact on the conservation of wildlife and wild places of concern to us.

We will prioritize those areas where our science and conservation can inform policies and those where we are able to link our work on the ground with national priorities and international agreements, including trade agreements. We will also focus on policies and regulations that may negatively impact our mission and work.

Between now and 2020 we will use our knowledge to inform public policy in these areas:

• The international wildlife trade in high value wildlife products, with the aim of stopping wildlife trafficking.
• Terrestrial and marine protected areas, where we will help establish and manage parks and other protected areas, working closely with government and community partners.
• Land and seascape management, in which we will seek to maintain corridors and natural connectivity, address forest conversion and fragmentation, and work with extractive industries to avoid, mitigate, and offset the biodiversity impacts of their operations.
• Approaches to land-use planning that protect the health of wildlife, people, and domestic animals – all as underpinned by environmental stewardship.
• The challenges created by climate change, mitigation of the changes, and assistance to people and wild species adapting to such changes.