The scale of global biodiversity loss is difficult to grasp in the abstract, but a few figures make the stakes concrete. The 2019 IPBES Global Assessment found that roughly one million plant and animal species face extinction, more than at any prior point in human history, and that three quarters of land environments have been markedly altered by human activity. Colcom Foundation cites this research as part of the case for its conservation grantmaking.
Land Use as the Leading Driver
According to the IPBES assessment, human land use change ranks as the single largest driver of biodiversity decline worldwide, ahead of climate change, pollution, and direct exploitation of species. Colcom Foundation’s grantmaking reflects that finding by prioritizing habitat protection and restoration, funding work that ranges from wetland conservation to the removal of invasive species that outcompete native plants and animals.
The foundation’s materials also point to research by Bradshaw and colleagues, published in Frontiers in Conservation Science in 2021, which concluded that current human population levels and consumption patterns are driving a sixth mass extinction, with vertebrate population losses accelerating since the 1970s.
Translating Research Into Grants
Colcom Foundation uses this body of research to justify a grantmaking approach that treats habitat protection as urgent rather than optional. Its support for land trusts and conservation organizations across Pennsylvania and the broader United States is framed as a direct response to documented species decline rather than a general environmental gesture.
The foundation’s public education grants extend this same research to a wider audience, funding programs intended to explain how population growth and land use change interact to drive the biodiversity losses that IPBES and other researchers have documented over the past several years.
Species loss on the scale IPBES describes rarely results from a single event. It builds gradually as wetlands are drained and waterways are diverted for agriculture and development, each change removing habitat that species depend on for feeding, breeding, or migration. Colcom Foundation‘s grant criteria favor projects that interrupt this pattern early, funding restoration before local extinctions occur rather than after populations have already collapsed.
That preventive framing connects the foundation’s biodiversity focused grants to its broader environmental mission, positioning land use change and population growth as two closely linked forces behind the extinction trends that the 2019 IPBES assessment first brought into wide public view. See related link for more information.
Learn more about Colcom on https://fconline.foundationcenter.org/fdo-grantmaker-profile?key=COLC002