Major Conservation Group Guts Science Team in Strategy Shift

摘要

One of the world's largest and wealthiest conservation groups, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), is dramatically shrinking its core research unit as part of a broad reorganization. The change will break up the WWF's storied science team, which had 30 staffers and a $3.5 million budget, making it particularly big for a conservation nongovernmental organization. About a third of the Washington, D.C.-based researchers were laid off in late February and another third reassigned to other programs, WWF has confirmed. The WWF move is "very bad news for science," says Thomas Brooks, who leads the science unit at the International Union for Conservation of Nature, in Gland, Switzerland. "I think the decision is short-sighted."