Foundations backed by actor Leonardo DiCaprio and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos have launched a $200 million initiative to help save 100 of the world's most threatened species.

DiCaprio's Re:wild and the Bezos Earth Fund announced the Phoenix Species Project on Tuesday, describing it as the largest single fund ever created specifically to help recover critically endangered species.

The project will support efforts to protect animals including lemurs, salamanders, pangolins, pigs, tortoises and echidnas whose survival is threatened by habitat loss, climate change and other pressures.

DiCaprio has for years advocated for a major international effort to protect species at risk of extinction.

In 2021, he and Re:wild co-founder and CEO Wes Sechrest met Bezos and his wife, Lauren Sánchez Bezos, who are chair and vice chair of the Bezos Earth Fund. The meeting was followed by discussions with governments, environmental organisations and Indigenous communities about ways to protect some of the world's most vulnerable species.

Those discussions eventually led to the Phoenix Species Project.

Among the species the initiative will support are the golden-crowned sifaka, a lemur found in Madagascar; the Hickory Nut Gorge green salamander, which lives only in a small canyon in North Carolina; and the Visayan warty pig, found only on islands in the Philippines.

Other species include Mexico's Cozumel harvest mouse, the pink land iguana of the Galápagos Islands, the Malayan pangolin of Southeast Asia and Tanzania's pancake tortoise.

The project will also help protect the starry night harlequin toad, found only in Colombia's mountains, and Attenborough's long-beaked echidna, an egg-laying mammal native to New Guinea and named after renowned naturalist David Attenborough.

The initiative aims to provide long-term funding and support to conservation projects that have achieved progress but often struggle to secure enough resources to continue their work.

“We've protected the golden-crowned sifaka for years on a budget that would never match what this species deserves, but letting it go extinct was never an option,” said Tiana Andriamanana, executive director of Association Fanamby, one of the organisations receiving funding.

She said the new funding, along with global cooperation and technical support, would create new opportunities to protect the species.