Conservation Influencers

Natural Resources Defense Council

USA

The Natural Resources Defense Council emerged on the back of a hard-fought legal battle to put a stop to a renewable energy project in the 1960s. The project in question was a proposed two-gigawatt hydroelectric power station at Storm King Mountain, New York, on the banks of the Hudson river. The litigants were a group of 12 activists, mostly lawyers and legal students, known as the Scenic Hudson Preservation Conference and the power company was Consolidated Edison. The latter lost.

From the perspective of the activists, the campaign to stop the power station confirmed the efficacy of litigation to achieve their ends. Hence in 1970 they formed the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) to pursue future legal actions. NRDC’s website claims that it was America’s ‘first litigation-focused environmental NGO’. Ever since, NRDC has campaigned to either create new laws or to fight legal battles against proposed projects it dislikes.

According to NRDC’s website, its advocates helped to pass laws in New York and New Jersey that banned almost all ivory, mammoth, and rhino horn transactions, as well to increase the penalties for wildlife traffickers.

At CITES’ CoP-18, NRDC supported unsuccessful calls to list all elephants in appendix I and opposed proposals to reopen trade, however well regulated, in ivory. It also opposed all attempts to liberalise either trophy hunting or international trade in white rhinos. And it supported calls to list mako sharks in appendix II, against the advice of the CITES secretariat and the FAO Expert Advisory Panel for the assessment of proposals to amend CITES appendices.

Today, NRDC employs seven scientists at its Science Research Center and 32 litigation staff.

Leaders

Mitchell Bernard, President and Chief Counsel

Governance

Board of trustees chaired by Kathleen A. Welch.

Finances

According to Form 990, for the tax year ending June 2018, NRDC total revenue was USD181,821,968 and expenses were USD173,044,173, of which USD88,381,405 went on salaries and other employee related benefits.

About the directory

Conservation Influencers is a searchable directory of the animal activist, environmental and ecological lobby. It examines the history, mission, methodology and reputation of NGOs to assess their impact on the global conservation cause.

Featured

Franz Weber Foundation

From 1990 until 2015, Franz Weber Foundation (FFW) managed the Fazao-Malfakassa National Park in Togo, which was, according to an in-depth investigation by Duke University, ‘established by forcing the local communities off their land and without taking into consideration their point of view’. That same study cited convincing evidence from reports published in 1990, confirming that competition for land use was already ‘creating conflict between the local communities and park managers’. In 2015 Togo refused to renew FFW’s contract because, the report says, ‘local communities were still excluded from the management of the natural resources of their land’ and FFW had ‘failed to fulfil its contract’. Franz Weber Foundation plays a major role within CITES because it funds and manages from Switzerland the African Elephant Coalition (AEC), which represents 32 African range states, some of which have barely any elephants and others none at all. Contrary to the wishes of the range states in Southern Africa, which manage most of the world’s wild elephant populations, the AEC at CITES’ CoPs repeatedly tables proposals to put all of the world’s elephants in appendix I. And the AEC uses its voting power to keep in place prohibitions on ivory sales and all other trade in elephant-related derivatives, including skins and hair, which Southern African nations wish to legalise.

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