A new global synthesis highlights the funding gap for amphibian conservation and the measures that can keep amphibians afloat
A new global synthesis published in Nature Reviews Biodiversity by Borzée et al. (2025) delivers a clear and urgent message: past conservation efforts and their results are a source of hope, but the ongoing amphibian crisis demands additional tools—and addressing its widening funding gap. While protected areas remain essential, the scale and overlap of today’s threats also require improved collaboration across different scales and between diverse institutions.
A crisis decades in the making
More than 30 years have passed since the global amphibian crisis was first identified. Since then, conservation knowledge, tools, and priorities have evolved—but the risks facing amphibians have not disappeared. Even well-managed protected areas are often not enough to shield amphibians from emerging diseases or from rapidly shifting climate conditions and habitat change.
Habitat loss, climate change, emerging diseases, pollution, and invasive species are not acting in isolation. The way these threats interact makes conservation more challenging and reinforces the need for collaboration across disciplines and institutions.
Around 40% of amphibian species are currently listed as Critically Endangered (CR), Endangered (EN), or Vulnerable (VU) in the IUCN Red List. As mentioned in this paper, over 60% of salamander species, 39% of frog species, and 16% of caecilian species are threatened. The authors documented changes in amphibian conservation status across the Global Amphibian Assessments published in 2004 and 2022, tracking changes for the 1980-2004 and 2004-2022 periods. While a number of species have been downlisted (their conservation status improved) since 1980, the number of species that have been uplisted to higher extinction risk categories remains substantially higher. While there are important cases of recovery and hope, there’s still much more to be done.
Ex situ breeding remains an essential tool for amphibian conservation
Ever since the first Amphibian Conservation Action Plan (ACAP) was published in 2005, conservation breeding has been recognized as a key tool to give amphibians a lifeline—a call that eventually led to the founding of Amphibian Ark. The authors of this recent paper emphasize the need for conservation action at multiple scales: from habitat restoration and other landscape-level protection to species-specific interventions, including ex situ conservation breeding. The most recent ACAP (2024) also stresses it as a core tool to safeguard populations until their threats in the wild can be mitigated, habitats restored, and reintroductions become possible.
In the analysis by Borzée et al., conservation breeding and other ex situ measures figure as a conservation action for nine out of nine threats, citing it as an effective stopgap in the face of urgent threats.
Through Amphibian Ark’s Conservation Needs Assessment process, conservationists have already identified 424 amphibian species worldwide that urgently require ex situ rescue through conservation breeding. Yet only about 20% of those species currently have active programs in place. The gap represents hundreds of species on the edge with no safety net—yet!
A widening funding gap
As was recently documented also by Guénard et al. (2025), amphibians are the group of vertebrates with the highest proportion of threatened species on the IUCN Red List, yet they receive the least funding among threatened terrestrial vertebrates. Borzée et al. stress the urgent need to address this funding gap in order to scale the solutions that frogs, salamanders, and caecilians so desperately need.
To quote Borzée et al. 2025:
“Conservation breeding can be an effective stopgap in the face of urgent threats for the 10% of amphibians that are Critically Endangered and face a high probability of extinction before meaningful threat mitigation can occur.”
The amphibian crisis is nowhere near over, yet it has a severe funding gap. Your support can make all the difference.
Find the publication in Nature Reviews Biodiversity through this link.
Read the blog post of our partners at ASG here.
