Big Bet: Stop the Amazon from Tipping
Problem: The Amazon, one of the largest carbon sinks and sources of biodiversity in the world, is being destroyed by extractive economic activity at an alarming rate. Economically-poor and biodiversity-rich Amazonian communities need more viable alternatives to value chains that destroy these precious resources.
Solution: By incentivizing innovation, building coalitions, and leveraging emerging science to create new products from the rainforest that offer sustainable replacements for food, feed, fiber, and materials, CXL is reducing destruction, transforming the economies on the ground, and ensuring the region’s future thriving.
Big Bet: Prevent Future Pandemics
Problem: Our misuse of nature has fueled short-term gains at the expense of the health of the human species, wildlife, and wildlands, and the quality of our food systems. Poaching and illegal wildlife trafficking not only threaten endangered species but also increase the risk of zoonotic spillover—when diseases jump from animals to humans.
Solution: CXL is using conservation as a tool of planetary health by investing in solutions that ensure we understand where spillover is happening, thus allowing for intervention to slow pathogen emergence and mutation and ultimately preventing future pandemics.
Big Bet: Protect Wild Ecosystems Effectively
Problem: Invasive species and ineffective management of protected areas are two of the most urgent threats to biodiversity and ecosystem health. On islands, invasive species—often introduced through human activities—are responsible for 65% of global extinctions, posing an existential threat to fragile ecosystems. Meanwhile, many protected areas suffer from inadequate resources, oversight, and enforcement, leading to biodiversity loss, habitat degradation, and illegal activities such as poaching and deforestation.
Solution: CXL is leveraging technology and strategic partnerships to neutralize invasive threats and up-level protected area management, ensuring that these critical ecosystems are effectively safeguarded by conservationists who are equipped to move at the speed of the threats.
Big Bet: Disrupt the Field of Conservation
Solution: We are massively expanding the field of conservation with new disciplines, new solvers, new courses and approaches, new opportunities to participate, and new thought leadership that will allow us to match the speed and scale of the climate and biodiversity crises.