The Disney Conservation Fund’s 2025 grants went to 47 organizations working in 24 countries. The list is public, and it is more interesting than the announcement around it.
Almost none of the species on it are ones a visitor to Disney’s Animal Kingdom would recognize.
Who got funded
A sample from the published list, which runs to 47 entries:
- Bat Conservation International: greater long-nosed, lesser long-nosed and Mexican long-tongued bats, Mexico
- Clearwater Marine Aquarium: Greater Caribbean manatee, Belize
- Commonwealth Zoological Corporation: Blanding’s, wood and spotted turtles, United States
- Conservation Fusion: greater bamboo lemur, black-and-white ruffed lemur, aye-aye, Madagascar
- Fauna & Flora International USA: cao vit gibbon, Vietnam
- Frankfurt Zoological Society: Sumatran elephant, Indonesia
- GRACE Center and the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund: Grauer’s gorilla, Democratic Republic of Congo
- International Crane Foundation: Siberian, red-crowned, white-naped and hooded cranes, China
- Re:WILD: Mekong giant catfish, giant barb and freshwater stingray, Cambodia
- The International Rhino Foundation: greater one-horned rhinoceros, India
- Monarch Joint Venture: monarch butterfly, United States
- Conservation NW: grizzly bear, Canada lynx and wolverine, United States
Two zoos and an aquarium are on the list
That is the detail worth pulling out. Clearwater Marine Aquarium is an accredited zoological facility receiving a Disney grant to work on manatees in Belize. The Commonwealth Zoological Corporation, which operates Zoo New England, is receiving one for freshwater turtles in the United States. Frankfurt Zoological Society, which runs Zoo Frankfurt, is receiving one for Sumatran elephants.
So the money is not simply moving from a zoo to the NGO sector. Some of it moves from one zoological institution to another, funding field programs that the receiving zoos run themselves. A Florida theme park is paying a Massachusetts zoo to look after turtles and a German zoological society to look after elephants in Sumatra.
That is a funding network between accredited institutions, and it is close to invisible from outside.
What is not published
The 2025 list gives organization, species and country for all 47 projects. It gives no dollar amounts, either per project or in total, and we are not going to infer any. Anyone citing a 2025 figure is citing something Disney did not publish.
What is on the record is the cumulative number: more than $125 million since 1995, from Disney’s own Animals, Science and Environment team.
Why does this sit under a theme park?
Because the theme park is what makes it affordable. Animal Kingdom drew 8.77 million visitors in 2023, more than any zoo or aquarium in the world, and none of them bought a ticket to fund a cao vit gibbon survey in Vietnam.
There are fewer than a few hundred cao vit gibbons left and no constituency for them whatsoever. They are funded because an institution large enough not to need a reason decided to fund them.
Bat Conservation International’s grant lands on a beat we already cover: Lubee Bat Conservancy has funded 222 bat projects since 1989 on a ten dollar gate. And the manatee grant to Clearwater sits beside ZooTampa’s manatee hospital, which carries roughly two thirds of its own costs.
Sources: Disney Conservation Fund, 2025 Funded Projects; Disney Impact, Nature; TEA/AECOM Theme Index.
