A private fund to help sea otters steps in

Nonprofit has raised $1.4 million after Trump administration proposed slashing financial support for threatened wildlife

- BY TODD WOODY

On a blue-sky afternoon, kayakers paddle past dozens of sea lions lolling in the sun and make a beeline toward the sea otters lounging on beds of eel grass at Elkhorn Slough on California’s Central Coast.

The playful predators not only generate millions of dollars in tourism revenue, but their voracious appetite for destructive species has revived this sprawling estuary while making the region's carbon-sequestering kelp forests more resistant to climate change.

The U.S. government determined in 2022 that reintroducing sea otters to their historic range on the West Coast would be a boon to biodiversity and climate resilience, laying out a road map to restoration that would cost up to $43 million.

But as the Trump administration moves to slash funding for wildlife programs, a nonprofit co-founded by a Silicon Valley entrepreneur is stepping in to raise nearly that amount to finance and coordinate what would be a complicated, years-long effort to connect isolated populations of sea otters.

So far it has raised more than $1.4 million of its $40-million target.

"We are coming in at a time when we've seen these dramatic cuts from the federal government and conservationists are facing major funding gaps," says Paul Thomson, chief programs officer at the Wildlife Conservation Network, the San Francisco nonprofit that launched the Sea Otter Fund earlier this year.

In August, a veteran U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service official, Jen Miller, left the government to run the fund.

The initiative could be a harbinger of a future in which private donors assume a more prominent role in financing and advancing wildlife restoration as climate impacts multiply.