Her Excellency Razan Khalifa Al Mubarak opened the meeting of the International Union for Conservation of Nature Species Survival Commission’s Specialists Group Chairs Meeting in Abu Dhabi today.

Today marked the opening of the fourth meeting of the Specialists Group Chairs meeting and was sponsored by Abu Dhabi and the Environment Agency Abu Dhabi. More than 300 specialists converged on Abu Dhabi to assess, plan and act to save the worlds most threatend species from extinction.

In fact, it was at the first meeting of the IUCN SSC SGCM that the seeds for the MBZ Species Conservation Fund were first sown, said Her Excellency Razan Khalifa Al Mubarak. In 2008 “we learned from you what you needed to help facilitate your species conservation efforts, including timely financial support, often in amounts less than $25,000, for direct species conservation efforts without significant bureaucratic hurdles or red tape. Since 2009 the Mohamed bin Zayed Species Conservation Fund has supported more than 2,000 grants with almost $20 million dollars going to 1,300 species and subspecies.”