British entrepreneur Richard Prinsloo Curson has launched the most ambitious crowdfunding project yet. He’s looking to raise £5 billion to build a conservation park (dubbed Noah’s Ark) to preserve ‘every species on the planet’. It’s a colossal conservation plan, perhaps the biggest one ever.
Richard Prinsloo Curson said:
The animal kingdom is at a crisis point. Climate change, overdevelopment, farming, ocean plastic, big game hunting, and poaching are driving thousands of species off the face of the planet. We owe it to future generations to preserve the natural world, or our children will be left fighting the horrific consequences of climate change to survive.
The process will be filmed from start to finish for a new documentary airing on Globetrotter Television from January 11, 2021. People are invited to watch as the team raises money, builds up the park, collects animals, and so much more.
Noah’s Ark will be a state-of-the-art animal and ecological conservation park covering 100 sq km (38 square miles) in South Africa’s KwaZulu Natal province. With the support of His Majesty the King of the Zulus, construction began in August 2020. When complete, the development will feature the world’s most giant aquarium, the world’s biggest geo domes with artificial environments replicating the Amazon rainforest and Antarctica, and a national park.
Noah’s Ark’s mission is the same as the biblical Noah’s Ark: to stop Earth’s animals from being wiped out. There will be effective breeding programs to save endangered species from becoming extinct and animal protection against the “brutal and selfish actions of the human race.”
According to a World Wildlife Fund (WWF) report in 2018, humans have wiped out 60% of Earth’s animals since 1970.
Mike Barrett, the WWF’s conservation and science executive director said:
We are sleepwalking towards the edge of a cliff. If there were a 60% decline in the human population, that would be equivalent to emptying North America, South America, Africa, Europe, China, and Oceania.
That is the scale of what we have done. This is far more than just about losing the wonders of nature, desperately sad though that is. This is actually now jeopardizing the future of people. Nature is not a ‘nice to have’ – it is our life-support system.
Meanwhile, there’s another fantastic and ambitious conservation project being built in China now called WorldWild. It’s a zoological resort by maverick hotel designer Bill Bensley where humans are “caged” and animals roam free.
