WASHINGTON (April 25, 2024) – President Biden yesterday signed a bipartisan invoice reauthorizing and enhancing a program that gives funding all through the Americas for partnerships to learn migratory birds and their habitats. The Migratory Birds of the Americas Conservation Enhancements Act reauthorizes essential funding for the Neotropical Migratory Bird Conservation Act (NMBCA) program and will increase its accessibility for companions.
The laws was launched within the Home by Representatives María Elvira Salazar (R-FL), Rick Larsen (D-WA), Dave Joyce (R-OH), and Mary Peltola (D-AK). A Senate model was launched by Senators Ben Cardin (D-Md.) and John Boozman (R-Ark).
“As migratory birds face unprecedented threats from habitat loss and a altering local weather, it’s all the extra crucial that packages like this are in a position to meet the challenges of the second,” mentioned Elizabeth Grey, CEO of the Nationwide Audubon Society. “This laws acknowledges that conservation is aware of no boundaries, and reversing troubling declines in fowl populations means investing in habitats and communities all through the hemisphere. We thank the sponsors for his or her management, and urge full funding of this essential program going ahead.”
Along with benefitting habitats and communities, conserving migratory birds is necessary to the 96 million Americans who engage in birdwatching, contributing $100 billion to the U.S. economy each year. The brand new laws additionally enhances this system by decreasing the cost-share requirement for companions from a three-to-one to a two-to-one match.
Since 2002, the NMBCA has funded more than 700 projects in 35 nations all through the Western Hemisphere. This system has benefitted greater than 5 million acres of habitat throughout the nesting, stopover, and wintering grounds for greater than 350 species that migrate annually between the U.S. and Canada, and Latin America and the Caribbean. For instance, the NMBCA has conserved key forested landscapes for Cerulean Warblers from the Appalachian Mountains in West Virginia to the Andes Mountains in Colombia, improved grassland habitat for Bobolinks on working lands from New York to Argentina, and benefitted shorebirds akin to Hudsonian Godwits from Alaska to Chile.
Media contact: Robyn Shepherd, robyn.shepherd@audubon.org
About Audubon
The Nationwide Audubon Society protects birds and the locations they want, at this time and tomorrow. Audubon works all through the Americas utilizing science, advocacy, schooling, and on-the-ground conservation. State packages, nature facilities, chapters, and companions give Audubon an unparalleled wingspan that reaches tens of millions of individuals annually to tell, encourage, and unite various communities in conservation motion. A nonprofit conservation group since 1905, Audubon believes in a world by which individuals and wildlife thrive. Be taught extra at www.audubon.org and on Fb, Twitter and Instagram @audubonsociety.
