About Us

Since its inception in 1994 as the Global Survival Network, the organization now known as Wildlife Alliance has worked with local governments, communities and other like-minded non-governmental organizations to implement cutting edge programs in Southeast Asia, Russia, South America, and the Western Pacific. These programs aim to conserve the environment and stop the illegal wildlife trade by directly protecting wildlife in the field, reducing consumer demand for wildlife, and providing alternative livelihoods for local communities.

1994: A group of conservationists establishes the environmental and human rights group Global Survival Network (GSN).

1996: Suwanna Gauntlett and the Wildlife Protection Society of India (WPSI) provide program design and technical assistance to protect India’s Olive Ridley turtle from being destroyed by industrial trawlers. Turtle nestings recovered from an all time low of 8,130 in 1997, increasing to 683,900 in 1999 and over 1,008,683 in 2000.

1994: GSN and Suwanna Gauntlett partner to create Inspection Tiger Anti-Poaching Patrols in the Russian Far East to save the Siberian tiger and Amur leopard, and later launch the conservation NGO Phoenix Fund with Russian tiger patrol leader Sergei Bereznuk. Tiger population rebounds from only 80 individuals in 1994 to over 400 in 2000.

1999: GSN, represented by Steve Galster, merges with partners Suwanna Gauntlett, Steven Trent, and Peter Knights, to become WildAid.

1999-2002: WildAid’s Marine Seascapes program provides training, equipment, and park infrastructure in the Galapagos and two Mexican marine reserves to strengthen effectiveness of coastal/deep sea patrolling and stop illegal fishing of sharks, turtles, marine mammals, and coral reefs. 

2000: Suwanna Gauntlett arrives in Cambodia to assess the feasibility of extending WildAid’s work to the country’s imperiled forests and wildlife.  The Cambodian government reports that many NGOs are conducting biodiversity studies but forests and wildlife are still continuing to decline.  They request WildAid’s specialized technical assistance to implement direct protection inside national parks. Suwanna creates the Cambodia Conservation Program to help strengthen the park protection system, fight wildlife trafficking, and assist with a national campaign to stop buying wildlife.

2001: WildAid launches the Wildlife Rapid Rescue Team (WRRT) to stop illegal shipments of wildlife on national roads and borders, and to arrest traffickers.  To date, WRRT has rescued over 40,000 live animals and stopped 80% of restaurants in Phnom Penh from serving wildlife dishes.

2001: WildAid begins the Care for Rescued Wildlife (CRW) program in Cambodia, providing food, enclosures, and veterinary care to thousands of victims of the illegal wildlife trade, from 74 species including Asian elephants, Indochinese tigers, Pileated gibbons, and Siamese crocodiles.

2002: WildAid assists Burma's first national park, Alangdaw Kathapa, to build capacity of the Forestry Department and train rangers in patrolling, law enforcement, wildlife protection, monitoring, and community outreach.

2002: Suwanna Gauntlett creates the South West Elephant Corridor protection program in the Cardamom Mountain Range, Cambodia, to preserve 2.5 million acres of rainforest and one of only seven remaining elephant corridors in Asia. The program reduced elephant poaching by 95 percent, tiger poaching by 50 percent and forest fires by 80 percent, thus avoiding fragmentation of the corridor’s continuous forest cover.

2003: BBC’s Tiger Trafficking features Suwanna Gauntlett and Steve Galster in WildAid’s tiger conservation programs of the Russian Far East and Cambodia.

2004:  WildAid establishes the Community Agriculture Development Program (CADP) for 200 desperately poor families of landless farmers in the Southern Cardamom Mountain Range.  To prevent these famers from burning hundreds of acres of rainforest every year for cultivation,  CADP helps them develop non-destructive income sources – through access to land rights, agriculture enterprises, transfer of technical knowledge, drip irrigation, micro-financing, and a new agricultural association. 

2004: WildAid convinces the government of Thailand to advocate for a regional wildlife law enforcement network to address Southeast Asia's role as a hub for illegal wildlife trafficking. Ten ASEAN countries join and sign the ASEAN-Wildlife Enforcement Network agreement to cooperate on stopping illegal shipments across borders.

2004: WildAid launches the Kouprey Express, a mobile education bus that travels through rural Cambodia around Protected Areas, teaching schoolchildren and villagers to stop burning the forest and poaching  wildlife. 

2006: Phoenix Fund's Director, Sergei Bereznuk, wins a £30,000 Whitley Award for re-routing oil pipeline away from the habitat of critically endangered Amur leopards in the Russian Far East.

2006: WildAid agrees to divide into two separate non-profit organizations: Wildlife Alliance, conducting field programs in Southeast Asia and the Russian Far East, keeping the same non-profit registration, and WildAid, under a new non-profit registration, conducting public outreach campaigns through the Active Conservation Awareness Program (ACAP), shark campaign and Galapagos Forever programs.

2007: CNN's Anderson Cooper 360° series, Planet in Peril, features Wildlife Alliance programs in Thailand and Cambodia.

2007:  Care for Rescued Wildlife program rescues 138 captive wild animals from neglect and deplorable conditions at the Angkor Zoo in Siem Reap, Cambodia. The government cracks down and closes the zoo.

2007: Animal Planet's Crime Scene Wild series, hosted by co-founder Steve Galster and airing in Europe, Asia, and North America, features efforts to crack down on wildlife trafficking around the world.

2008:  Chi Phat Community-Based Ecotourism (CBET) is launched, with the participation of 167 poor families who had been burning the rainforest to cultivate their crops and hunting wildlife to sell to traffickers. Thanks to micro-credit scheme, capacity building, and investment in village infrastructure, former slash-and-burn farmers are now gradually converting to sustainable enterprises (trekking, guiding, homestays, kayaking, mountain biking).

2008: Steve Galster testifies to Congress on links between the illegal wildlife trade and national security.

2008: Wildlife Alliance launches a tree planting project to reconnect the fragmented rainforest in the Cardamom Mountains, providing jobs to 80 local women and 100 local men who grow 500,000 trees in nursery and plant about 450 acres every year. The goal is to ultimately restore more than 5000 acres of rainforest with 58 species of native tropical trees to benefit the local community and restore continuity of the elephant corridor.

2009: First ecotourists arrive to support forest and wildlife conservation through Community-Based Ecotourism in Chi Phat, in the Southern Cardamoms Protected Forest of Cambodia. Families begin to receive revenues in August when Chi Phat is officially open for tourism.

2009: MSNBC and Jeff Corwin visit Cambodia to film Wildlife Alliance field projects for the 100 Heartbeats documentary, featuring an undercover raid of a restaurant serving wildlife, and park rangers cracking down on illegal logging and hunting camps deep in the Cardamoms rainforest.

2010: The Wildlife Rapid Rescue Team gains official recognition from ten Asian countries as Cambodia’s official wildlife crime task force and joins with the Association of South East Asian Nations Wildlife Enforcement Network (ASEAN-WEN) to combat wildlife trade from Cambodia into Vietnam, Thailand, and China.