Local action, global impact for biodiversity

On May 22, the world marks the International Day for Biological Diversity with a theme that defines everything the Global Environment Facility Small Grants Program stands for: Acting locally for global impact.

The numbers behind the global biodiversity crisis can feel overwhelming. One million species threatened with extinction. Sixty-nine percent average decline in monitored wildlife populations since 1970. Seventy-five percent of the Earth’s land surface significantly altered by human activity. Against this scale of loss, it is easy to feel that only interventions at large scale can turn the tide.

Over three decades of work by the GEF Small Grants Program offers a different perspective: communities that live alongside nature know best how to protect it. When given the resources and decision-making authority, their actions are effective in stemming the tide of loss.

The GEF SGP supports and finances community-led initiatives to address global environmental issues through a decentralized, country-level delivery mechanism, usually supported by a country multistakeholder governance structure. The SGP is designed to mobilize bottom-up actions by empowering local civil society and community-based organizations, including Indigenous Peoples, women, and youth. Since 1992, the GEF has provided the SGP over $1.5 billion that have been used in grants of up to $50,000 each, given directly to community organizations and Indigenous Peoples in 136 countries.

The GEF SGP core global program is currently implemented by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), and Conservation International (CI).

An evaluation published by the GEF’s own Independent Evaluation Office in 2024, covering 190 projects using community-based approaches, singled the SGP as one of the GEF’s strongest examples of community-based finance in action. It further confirmed that projects giving communities genuine decision-making power consistently outperform the rest of the GEF portfolio on environmental outcomes.

Three stories from three continents show what that means on the ground.

Colombia: The jaguar becomes an asset

In Colombia’s Guaviare department, communities have long lived alongside the jaguar—and paid the price when it took their livestock. With GEF SGP support, those same communities developed ecotourism, wildlife monitoring, and environmental education programs that transformed the jaguar from a threat into an economic opportunity. Farmers became wildlife guardians. Former hunters became nature guides. The jaguar, once worth more dead than alive to a struggling family, became the centerpiece of a nature-based economy.

Kenya: A forest’s medicine, a community’s knowledge

In the Mau Forest Complex—Kenya’s largest water catchment and home to more than 52,000 Ogiek people—the loss of traditional medicinal knowledge and the loss of the forest are the same crisis. For generations, Ogiek healers have drawn on the forest’s pharmacopoeia of medicinal plants, passing knowledge orally from parent to child. As that knowledge faces pressure from urbanization, commercialization, and the marginalization of traditional practitioners, the plants themselves—and the forest ecosystems they depend on—come under threat too.

Three GEF SGP projects working through the Global Support Initiative to Indigenous and Community Conserved Areas, are addressing this challenge at both levels simultaneously: documenting traditional knowledge, restoring degraded medicinal plant habitats, establishing tree nurseries, and promoting intergenerational transmission of the healing arts. Forest health and human health turn out to be the same question.