Sri Lanka’s Central Highlands are a UNESCO World Heritage Site and home to many unique and endangered species—including the Sri Lankan leopard, which has fewer than 1,000 of its kind surviving in the wild. These animals and their habitats are in danger from both deforestation and poaching. 

Starting this Earth Day, April 22, 2024, you can help protect this vulnerable species by funding wildlife corridors and conservation training programs in the Sri Lankan Highlands!

This project, in partnership with the Wilderness & Wildlife Conservation Trust (WWCT), will maintain 17 miles of wildlife movement corridors and create 15 new conservation programs for local communities. With your support, we can ensure a sustainable future for the Sri Lankan leopard, the majestic Central Highlands, and the people who call them home. 

Industry and Economic Crisis

As well as being a home for plants and animals found nowhere else in the world, the Sri Lankan Highlands provide an ideal environment for growing the country’s world-renowned tea. Over the decades, plantation agriculture has expanded at the expense of native forests, leaving the habitats of threatened species shrinking and fragmented. 

Tea plantation workers labor under difficult conditions for low wages, and Sri Lanka’s prolonged financial crisis has made their situation worse. Driven by poverty, some people destroy native wildlife habitats by cutting trees and clearing land for farming. In order to protect their subsistence garden plots, often on the fringes of wildlife territory, some also set illegal wire snares, which indiscriminately trap and kill leopards and other animals. An average of eight Sri Lankan leopards per year are killed by traps or poaching.

Habitat Restoration

Seacology is working with the Wilderness and Wildlife Conservation Trust (WWCT) to ensure better protection for the leopards and other endangered species that call the Central Highlands home—including the western purple-faced langur, Horton Plains slender loris, fishing cat, and Indian pangolin.

In 2016, WWCT began working to protect wildlife movement corridors on ridges above the tea estates. These corridors help reconnect fragments of the forest, allowing native species to roam more freely and live in harmony with the communities that share the land. Using remote cameras, WWCT has identified 57 individual leopards in the area. 

Hope for a Better Future

When WWCT began to reach out to local communities, many residents did not know that poaching is illegal, or that the number of Sri Lankan leopards is decreasing. Now, local residents help with forest nursery upkeep and outplanting, and many young people participate in a Forest Guardian program.

As Forest Guardians, local youth receive conservation education in classrooms and in the field. This program helps young Sri Lankans, passionate about protecting their country’s natural heritage, grow into experienced stewards of their land. Forest Guardians lead awareness programs, help restore the forest, advocate for snare removal, and conduct anti-poaching initiatives. 

What Your Contribution Will Do

This project will fund the creation of 15 new Forest Guardian programs, each serving groups of 10 to 20 teenagers. Fifteen school resource rooms will be outfitted as spaces for Forest Guardians to gather, share, and learn. WWCT will conduct another 40 outreach programs, engaging up to 20,000 schoolchildren in plantation communities. 

Every gift to our campaign, large or small, will go directly to creating conservation resource classrooms, training young guardians to educate and advocate against poaching, replanting the forest, and setting an example for other young conservationists across Sri Lanka. Thank you so much for your support!

Members of our board of directors have made generous personal gifts to help kick off our campaign, and we're excited to announce that the NuSkin Force For Good Foundation has offered to match $5,000 to ensure the success of this urgently needed project.

Our project is helping train young people to protect the Central Highlands' vulnerable forests.

The Central Highlands' forests are home to many unique and threatened species found only in Sri Lanka.