From 1998 to 2003, the MCFEA supported the Southern African wild cats project conducted by WildCRU - the Wildlife Conservation Research Unit of Oxford University. The purpose of the project, in Hwange National Park, Zimbabwe, was to assess the impact on lion populations of commercial hunting. This research, led by Professor David Macdonald, addressed the growing problem of conflict between humans and lions, often caused by competition for precious resources.

WildCRU also started a successful conservation education initiative: a local theatre group, the Ingonyama Players, who write and perform plays with strong conservation messages. The Ingonyama Players play to school and villages using song, dance and story-telling – all culturally relevant and accessible to people in a region where there is limited access to other media. The long-term success of this project has been supported by MCFEA sponsorship.

The GRD

The main objective of Gesellschaft zur Rettung der Delphine (“GRD”) is to
protect whales and dolphins and to conserve their habitats. In 2003 and
2004 the Fund made ?10,000 contributions to GRD to help the start-up of their activities in Croatia to study and conserve Adriatic dolphins.

The GRD has established, together with the Veterinary Faculty of the University of Zagreb, a local NGO (“VAL”), and has developed a project to build a small Marine Mammal Research and Conservation Centre on the island of Ugljan, off the coast of mainland Croatia. The MCFEA contributed 20,000 in 2005 towards the purchase of a small plot of land for this centre.

ARKive

In 2006, the MCFEA will support ARKive, a not-for-profit initiative of Wildscreen, a UK-based charity, whose mission is ‘to use the power of wildlife images to inspire the people of the world to value and conserve our natural environment and its biodiversity’.

ARKive brings together into one centralised digital library, films, photographs and audio recordings of the world’s species.Using film, photographs and audio recordings, ARKive is creating a unique record of the world’s biodiversity - complementing other species information datasets, and making a key resource available for scientists, conservationists, educators and the general public. Continued habitat destruction and the rise in extinction rates mean that for many species, films, photographs and audio recordings may soon be all that remains.