Halcyon Land & Sea

Natural habitat underpins the future of biodiversity. As fragile wild places (and undisrupted ocean environments) disappear so too do the animals and plants that live there.

Through Halcyon Land & Sea – our fund dedicated to securing vital areas of natural habitat – FFI is able to ensure that some of the world’s most special sites, and their associated wildlife, will survive.

Our efficient management and decision making processes mean we can intervene quickly in emergencies, where areas are under immediate threat of conversion or destruction.

Our impact

Since 1998 Halcyon Land & Sea (previously known as the Arcadia Land Trust) has:

• directly secured 4.55 million hectares of natural habitat
• contributed to the conservation of a total of 22.5 million hectares of land or coast, across over 30 sites

Halcyon Land & Sea sites protect some of the world’s most endangered species – the leatherback turtle, hirola antelope, African wild dog, Iberian lynx and Zino’s petrel.

By protecting carbon-rich natural habitats from destruction we also estimate that we have avoided the release of over 200 million tonnes of CO₂ into the atmosphere.

How we work

We are flexible in how we intervene – be it direct support to site management, management agreements or outright purchase of the site. Some recent examples of Halcyon interventions include:

• Purchasing a key area of Choco rainforest otherwise destined to be clear-felled
• Underpinning management costs for the Niassa Reserve in Mozambique
• Developing community-managed forests in Tanzania

Local ownership and management

We always operate in partnership with local partners – be they NGOs, governments or communities – to ensure that areas secured are owned and managed locally.

We also work to ensure that communities living in and around Halcyon sites can benefit from the presence of our conservation efforts – through a focus on supporting their needs and creating new opportunities.

Halcyon Land & Sea is supported by the grant-making trust Arcadia and by a number of individual donors.