We are thrilled to announce our new partnership with World Land Trust, marked by the award of a major grant to complete the purchase of Ukuwela. This generous final gift of funding secures Ukuwela as a conservation area owned and managed by Wild Tomorrow Fund South Africa, creating lasting impact for the region’s threatened wildlife.

*A giraffe calf and mother at Ukuwela, now protected in perpetuity for the region’s threatened wildlife. Giraffe were reintroduced to Ukuwela in 2017, with a first calf born in 2019.*

World Land Trust (WLT)’s mission is to protect the world’s most biologically important and threatened habitats. Since its foundation in 1989, WLT has funded local partner organizations around the world like Wild Tomorrow Fund to create reserves and give permanent protection for habitats and wildlife. To date, they have protected an incredible 2,409,420 acres of threatened habitat stretching from South America’s Choco rainforest, to tiger reserves in India, habitat for orangutans and pygmy elephants in Borneo, and now, our wildlife corridor in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa.

WLT’s grant of 3.9 million Rand (approximately US $260,000) is our largest grant to date, completing the 15.5 million Rand purchase of Ukuwela and adding the equivalent of 318 acres (of total 1,235 at Ukuwela) to WLT’s impressive tally of acres protected in special places around the world - and a first project for WLT in South Africa. We are grateful for their trust, and recognition of the importance of our habitat protection project, located within one of world’s 36 global biodiversity hotspots. Check out WLT’s project partner page for Wild Tomorrow Fund here.

When Wild Tomorrow Fund reached out to WLT last June, we were at a critical point in our fundraising journey to save Ukuwela. We had just one year left to raise the remaining funds needed for the purchase, before the 5-year payment deadline. Ukuwela (formerly known as “The Farm Pineapple 16074”) was the very first piece of land that Wild Tomorrow Fund sought to protect in what would expand in vision and ambition to become our wildlife corridor project on South Africa’s elephant coast. We took our first steps on this special piece of land in 2017, a transformative moment for Wild Tomorrow Fund. At that time, it was imminently destined to become a pineapple farm. This fate would have seen Ukuwela’s 1,235 acres slashed and burned to make way for commercial pineapple fields, a scene repeated across the region in vast monoculture plantations. This conversion to farming, and the pollution of associated herbicides and pesticides, was an immediate threat to Ukuwela’s river, its forests, wetlands, hippos, leopards, zebras, hyena, wildebeest, honey badgers, baboons, crocodiles, mongoose and 40 threatened animal species that already called this land home.

*Ukuwela to the left, commercial pineapple fields to the right. This would have been the land’s fate until our urgent intervention to save it, starting in 2017.*

We negotiated a deal with the landowner, who allowed us to make a down-payment to save the land, with five years interest-free to complete the purchase. It was a daunting task for our newly established charity given the land’s 1.2-million dollar price tag. But we believed in the generosity of people around the world, who cared as much as we do about the fate of the planet’s threatened wildlife and wild places

Mary McEvoy, World Land Trust’s Carbon Programme Manager said, "All of us at WLT are delighted to welcome Wild Tomorrow Fund to our growing network of conservation partners. This is the very sort of project WLT was created in 1989 to support: urgent conservation action, delivered to the habitats that need it the most by the local conservationists who know the land best. Together with the WLT Action Fund donors who funded part of this purchase, we look forward to making a difference for Ukuwela's 1,200-plus species.”

*A leopard caught on camera trap at Ukuwela, now protected habitat that provides safe passage for this wide-ranging species.*

A wild array of unique biodiversity is protected at Ukuwela: from leopards to mantids, giraffe, hippos, crocodiles, hyena, over 400 bird species including critically endangered vulture species, and more. So far we have cataloged 1,240 species and counting. It is this species richness that enabled Ukuwela be declared part of the Greater Ukuwela Nature Reserve and protected at the highest legal level in South Africa, on equal footing with a national park.

While the poaching of elephants and rhinos makes the headlines, it is habitat destruction and fragmentation that is the major cause of species extinction globally. One of World Land Trust’s patrons is conservation giant and inspiration, Sir David Attenborough. In his latest book, A Life on Our Planet: My Witness Statement and a Vision for the Future, he says, “The conversion of wild habitat to farmland as humankind expanded has been the single greatest direct cause of biodiversity loss during our time on Earth”. He continues, “creating wild lands across Earth would bring back biodiversity, and the biodiversity would do what it does best: stabilize the planet.”

We are incredibly thankful to World Land Trust for their support and partnership, and look forward to learning from their three decades of experience saving and restoring habitat around the world.

“We have one final chance to create the perfect home for ourselves and to restore the wonderful world we inherited. All we need is the will to do so”

— Sir David Attenborough in "A LIFE ON OUR PLANET"

OUR NEW PARTNERSHIP WITH WORLD LAND TRUST