Largest gift in Rainforest Rescue’s history will help conserve the Daintree Oxbow
The floodplain south of the Daintree River which contains the Daintree Oxbow is an area of ecological importance for Australian conservation. © Martin Stringer/Rainforest Rescue
Rainforest Rescue has received $5.33 million from the Wright Burt Foundation, the largest gift in our 27-year history. It is part of a landmark $120 million commitment by the Foundation to conservation efforts across Australia.
We intend to use much of this gift directly on the Daintree Oxbow program, conserving and managing land across the floodplain. The remainder will build the long-term organisational strength needed to see the work through, because our plan to reconnect a landscape requires a decades-long undertaking.
Rainforest Rescue is one of 10 recipients, alongside national organisations including Australian Wildlife Conservancy, Bush Heritage Australia and the Great Barrier Reef Foundation. The Foundation chose organisations it has vetted personally and believes in; a powerful endorsement of the work being done in the Daintree.
“Tropical rainforests of Australia make up between 0.1- 0.2% of the entire landmass and within that, Australia is custodian to a 180-million-year-old rainforest known as the Daintree, which predates the Amazon.” Said Julian Burt, Wright Burt Foundation.
“Rainforest Rescue is acutely aware of this, along with the scale of rainforest loss since European colonisation. Their goal is simple: to correct the over-clearing and put back what should have never been erased.
Focused on areas of low agricultural benefit, the Rainforest Rescue team are increasing the area under rainforest, bringing communities together. With singular vision their hope is to return nature to its home where it is most beautiful on the Australian continent.”
Stepping in to support efforts
The Biodiversity Council’s analysis of the 2026-27 federal budget found that on-ground nature programs receive just 0.06% of spending, or $1 in every $1,667. Funding is set at $496 million for 2026-27, down from $518 million actually spent in 2025-26. By 2028-29 it falls to $323 million, a real-terms cut of 46% that would take nature’s share below 0.04% of the budget.
Private philanthropy is helping to fill that gap. The Foundation has said it hopes its gift will strengthen and accelerate work, with a need for overall efforts to increase to reverse the environment’s decline across Australia.
“In the Daintree, we’re working to restore whole landscapes, from seed to canopy, reconnecting rainforest to wetland to river to Reef,” said Rainforest Rescue CEO Branden Barber. “For a century, this land was valued for what could be taken from it. Now we can value it for what it gives back: cleaner water for the Reef, habitat for threatened native and migratory species, local jobs, and reasons for visitors to come. That’s the restoration economy, and this gift helps us build it.”
The work is far from finished. There is still land to secure across the floodplain and likely decades of ecological recovery work ahead. Closing that gap will take more than any one funder.
“Restoration is becoming a movement, not just a project,” Branden explains, “Landholders, Traditional Owners, scientists and funders are all realising that recovering nature and building a strong regional economy are the same job.”
To learn more about Rainforest Rescue’s conservation vision for the Daintree Oxbow, visit our project page.
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