Nearly two years after US President Trump’s decision to dismantle the international development agency USAID, which removed nearly US$1 billion from global conservation and environment funding, the agency’s absence is being felt across the world, a new analysis says.
The abrupt termination of around 5,200 contracts in early 2025 ended support for activities as varied as plastic waste collection from beaches in East Africa, wildlife ranger patrols in Vietnam and crop substitution for coca farmers in the Amazon.
Without USAID’s support, long-running projects intended to protect landscapes and support environmental policymaking have floundered or collapsed, according to the authors of the new report.
“It’s a more fragmented and less-coordinated approach to solving global environmental problems, and we’re leaving communities and people behind because of that,” said Monica Bansal, co-author and former director of USAID’s Center for Energy, Infrastructure, and Cities.
The 166-page report is the first comprehensive review of the impact of USAID’s closure on its nature-related initiatives. It was produced by consultancy firm One Earth Partners, which was founded in 2025 by Bansal and former USAID Natural Climate Solutions Division chief Hadas Kushnir.
The report uses survey data and interviews with 150 people connected to USAID’s work in Bangladesh, Peru, Kenya, Colombia and Vietnam.
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One of the things that we’re trying to do with the report is demystify a little bit of what USAID was doing, show funders where the gaps are, and then provide them with concrete ways with these projects that they can fill those gaps.
Hadas Kushnir, former natural climate solutions division chief, USAID
In the 2024 fiscal year, USAID spent US$365.75 million on biodiversity conservation, US$256.5 million on climate adaptation, US$247 million on clean energy, and an additional US$232.25 million on natural climate solutions, ocean plastics, and pollution.
The report provides a window into how some of that money was being spent. For example, before being shut down, USAID trained Colombian and Peruvian officials in how to use satellite data to monitor deforestation in the Amazon. In another case, it was the lead donor funding anti-poaching and other wildlife law enforcement at Mozambique’s Gorongosa National Park.
Both projects were terminated when the agency shuttered, according to the report.
USAID’s long-standing relationships with local officials and willingness to give out grants in risky environments such as northern Kenya will be hard to replace, the report states.
“Some of the direct impacts that we heard on the environment were increased deforestation and poaching, increased risk to environmental defenders, and backsliding that’s happening in the policy arena,” Kushnir, who co-authored the report, told Mongabay.
In Bangladesh, a long-running effort to help rural communities set up nature-friendly ecotourism businesses stalled outright just as it was on the cusp of being finalised. USAID workers spent nearly two decades facilitating revenue-sharing agreements between the country’s Forest Department and those communities, including one for the Baikka Beel wetland. After the agency dissolved, management of the wetland reverted entirely back to the government, the report says.
It also finds that Kenya has been one of the hardest-hit countries. USAID was a crucial and early supporter of the country’s community-led conservancies, which contain a significant portion of Kenya’s wildlife. The agency’s sudden disappearance led to a crisis in some of the organisations set up to support those conservancies.
Daniel Sopia, CEO of the Maasai Mara Wildlife Conservancies Organization, said he was forced to lay off 10 staff members and cut 72 per cent of the organisation’s budget after losing a five-year, US$6.5 million grant. The loss derailed a plan to set up new conservancies that would have secured movement corridors for elephants and other wildlife.
“The new conservancies that we had identified to support under the project were put on hold,” he told Mongabay by phone.
In an emailed statement, a spokesperson for the US State Department declined to address the report directly.
“Under President Trump’s leadership, we are protecting our national security and economic interests in areas beyond national borders, including the high seas, Antarctica, and outer space, and combating transnational threats, like illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing; transboundary pollution in our air and water; and illegal logging and mining,” the spokesperson said.
Documenting the fallout
Bansal and Kushnir were both senior USAID employees who were among the 95 per cent of agency staff fired as part of the Trump administration’s purge in 2025. In the year that followed, the pair drew on their contacts and those of colleagues to gather information about what had been lost when the agency’s environmental portfolio was torn up.
“Nobody was telling the story of the impact of the loss of USAID’s development work,” Kushnir said. “They were very much telling the story of the loss of humanitarian and health assistance, but of that longer-term development work, nobody was doing it.”
Along with the findings of Bansal and Kushnir’s research, the report presents a set of recommendations for future policymakers who might wish to reboot foreign environmental aid.
“We can have a foreign assistance structure that’s better than it was before, and we should do that,” Bansal said.
The Trump administration’s decision to close USAID was widely criticised by environmental groups, though some had previously levelled complaints against the agency. The US-based Oakland Institute, for example, published a report in 2024 accusing USAID of facilitating the violent eviction of Indigenous pastoralists from Tanzania’s Ruaha National Park.
“The fingerprints of USAID are all over the harmful policies and projects to expand protected areas, rendering it complicit in the forced evictions of the Indigenous and other local communities across eastern and central Africa,” said Anuradha Mittal, executive director of the Oakland Institute, in an email to Mongabay.
Resson Duff, portfolio director for Maliasili, an organisation that funds and supports community-led conservation groups across Africa, said the requirements of top-down bilateral donors like USAID could distort the goals of smaller local partners.
“Very often these organisations are highly constrained to do and to perform activities that may not be in line with what they know will actually have impact, but they will take the money anyway because they need to pay salaries,” said Duff in a phone interview with Mongabay.
According to Duff, around one-quarter of the organisations Maliasili works with were partly funded by USAID or the US Fish and Wildlife Service. Within that group, assistance from the US government accounted for just under 30 per cent of their total funding — a significant loss.
However, many of them were subsequently able to find new donors to cover the gap.
“[Our] partners were not only able to fill the hole, that 28 per cent gap that USAID was creating, they actually were able to raise more money,” she said.
Other organisations have not been so fortunate. Alongside the report, One Earth Partners has released a list of 100 projects that were formerly funded by USAID and are now in need of support.
“One of the things that we’re trying to do with the report is demystify a little bit of what USAID was doing, show funders where the gaps are, and then provide them with concrete ways with these projects that they can fill those gaps,” Kushnir said.
The co-authors acknowledge that there were problems with the way USAID operated, including onerous requirements for local grantees and high overhead costs, but said their curated project list illustrates the kind of valuable work that was lost when it disappeared.
“The world we’re facing is a world in which we were already not meeting any of our [environmental] goals or commitments, and we are now going to have a harder time meeting them,” Bansal said.
This story was published with permission from Mongabay.com.
