Conservation Influencers

Association for the Conservation of Threatened Parrots

Brandenburg, Germany

Founded in 2006, the Association for the Conservation of Threatened Parrots (ACTP) is, according to its website, a registered non-profit organisation based in Germany that is dedicated to the protection and conservation of threatened parrots and their habitats. ACTP’s work involves both in situ and ex situ work, including the setting up and maintenance of safety net breeding populations.

Alongside its partners in Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent, Dominica, Brazil and Australia, ACTP develops techniques and implements measures to protect endangered parrots from illegal trafficking. One part of its mission is to preserve parrots in their natural habitats, free from human influences. To this end, ACTP operates a facility in Germany where it breeds endangered parrots with the dual intention of releasing them into the wild and increasing the magnitude of captive populations.

The Association for the Conservation of Threatened Parrots works with scientific institutions, international organisations and wildlife protection agencies, complemented by its cooperation with a large community of institutional and private breeding organisations. For example, it is involved in CITES’ affairs and it attended CoP-18.

The Guardian newspaper in the UK accused ACTP of being a secretive organization, which publishes no information on its website about its board or governance, no annual financial reports about its donors or other funding. However, the investigative journalists at The Guardian cited no rule-breaking (of CITES or any national laws whatsoever) in their article, and neither did they accuse ACTP of any animal welfare related management shortcomings.

Leader

Martin Gurth.

About the directory

Conservation Influencers is a searchable directory of the animal activist, environmental and ecological lobby. It examines the history, mission, methodology and reputation of NGOs to assess their impact on the global conservation cause.

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Franz Weber Foundation

From 1990 until 2015, Franz Weber Foundation (FFW) managed the Fazao-Malfakassa National Park in Togo, which was, according to an in-depth investigation by Duke University, ‘established by forcing the local communities off their land and without taking into consideration their point of view’. That same study cited convincing evidence from reports published in 1990, confirming that competition for land use was already ‘creating conflict between the local communities and park managers’. In 2015 Togo refused to renew FFW’s contract because, the report says, ‘local communities were still excluded from the management of the natural resources of their land’ and FFW had ‘failed to fulfil its contract’. Franz Weber Foundation plays a major role within CITES because it funds and manages from Switzerland the African Elephant Coalition (AEC), which represents 32 African range states, some of which have barely any elephants and others none at all. Contrary to the wishes of the range states in Southern Africa, which manage most of the world’s wild elephant populations, the AEC at CITES’ CoPs repeatedly tables proposals to put all of the world’s elephants in appendix I. And the AEC uses its voting power to keep in place prohibitions on ivory sales and all other trade in elephant-related derivatives, including skins and hair, which Southern African nations wish to legalise.

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