Mozambique’s Gorongosa Restoration Project receives E.O. Wilson Legacy Award for Transformative Conservation Leadership – Watch

• Mozambique’s Gorongosa National Park is the second recipient of the award, which went to Harrison Ford in 2025. CEO of the Gorongosa Restoration Project, Aurora Malene, accepted it at Harvard’s Sanders Theatre on Half-Earth Day.

The Gorongosa Restoration Project received the E.O. Wilson Legacy Award for Transformative Conservation Leadership on Monday at Half-Earth Day 2026, held at Sanders Theatre, Harvard University.

Dr. Paula J. Ehrlich, President and CEO of the E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation, presented the award. Aurora Malene, CEO of the Gorongosa Restoration Project, accepted it on behalf of Gorongosa scientists, rangers, and its teams who work in communities adjacent to the Park in support of education, healthcare, forestry and agriculture.

The presentation opened with a short film, narrated by Greg Carr, about Professor Wilson’s time in Gorongosa and the young Mozambican scientists continuing his work there. Actor and conservationist Harrison Ford, who received the inaugural award at Chicago’s Field Museum in October 2025, passed it on by video.

“Ed Wilson loved Gorongosa. He said it looked like it did before the coming of humanity,” Ford said. “The Gorongosa Restoration Project—rangers, scientists, teachers, doctors, and the young Mozambicans who are now leading this work—have spent more than 20 years making sure it stays that way. That’s what this award is for. And I can’t think of anyone more deserving of it. It is my honor to pass the E.O. Wilson Legacy Award to the Gorongosa Restoration Project.”

After the keynote, Malene was joined on stage by Dr. Susana Carvalho, Gorongosa’s Director of Science, for a conversation with emcee Adrienne Keene.

“Perhaps the greatest measure of restoration is not only what we bring back,” Malene said in her keynote. “It is what we make possible.”

His Excellency Alfredo Nuvunga, Ambassador of Mozambique to the United States, attended as part of the Mozambican delegation. “For Mozambique, Gorongosa is much more than a national park,” he said. “It is a living symbol of peace, reconciliation, resilience, and hope. Gorongosa has become an inspiring example of how nature can recover, communities can rebuild, and hope can be restored. In many ways, Gorongosa tells the story of Mozambique itself—a nation that has faced adversity but continues to believe in the power of peace, renewal, and partnership.”

Why Gorongosa?

The award honors individuals and organizations who carry forward E.O. Wilson’s work in conservation science, public engagement and movement-building.

Professor Wilson’s connection to Gorongosa began in 2008. Greg Carr had just signed an agreement with the Government of Mozambique to restore the Park. Carr considered Ed Wilson to be the most influential Biologist since Charles Darwin, so he told him about it. “He looked up at me and he said, ‘That makes my heart go pitter-patter,’” Carr recalls. Wilson went on to visit Gorongosa three times, staying about a month each time. He and his team recorded more than 200 ant species in the Park, 20 of them new to science. He took on young Mozambicans as field assistants and wrote about the Park in A Window on Eternity (2014). The Park’s research center, the E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Laboratory at Chitengo, is named after him, and much of the work recognized here today happens there.

Between 1972 and 2000, largely because of Mozambique’s civil war and its aftermath, Gorongosa lost more than 90% of its large animals. Restoration began in the early 2000s and, since 2008, has been carried out under a public-private partnership between the Government of Mozambique and the Carr Foundation. The Park now has more than 100% of the equivalent biomass of wildlife it had in the 1960s, before the civil conflict. Elephants, Waterbuck, Impala, Reedbuck, Kudu, Nyala and a multitude of other mammal, bird, reptile, amphibian, and fish species are now flourishing. The lion population, in single digits in 2004, now numbers more than 250.

Science has guided that recovery in partnership with over 80 universities working in the park, including Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Oxford, Cambridge, Lyon. Researchers have documented more than 8,000 species across the Greater Gorongosa landscape, roughly 200 of them new to science. The Park conducts the only Master’s in Conservation Biology based entirely inside a national park in the entire world. Gorongosa has graduated 48 Mozambican students; alumni now work in national parks, universities, and government. Capacity building is a major focus of science. Six staff members obtained competitive PhD scholarships for top universities in the UK, Portugal, and South Africa. Gorongosa research has produced over 100 research articles, including key findings showing how decades of ivory poaching drove the rise of tuskless elephants (published in Science), and the discovery of the first fossil sites of the southern end of the African Rift System (published in iScience).

That inventory is still growing. Over 11 days this July, a survey team from the E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Laboratory, led by Dr. Jacinto Mathe and coordinated by Eng. Dadzie Tarua, recorded about 592 plants, animal, and fungal taxa. Forty-eight of them had never been documented in the Park, including 25 insects, 20 fungi, two plants and a frog, Afrixalus crotalus. One dung beetle, a species of Drepanocerus, appears to be new to science.

“Our work today is led by Mozambican scientists and reflects the very essence of what Gorongosa stands for: science in service of people and nature. We believe that Science only matters if it builds people alongside knowledge,” said Dr. Susana Carvalho.

Greg Carr has described the approach this way: “The Gorongosa Restoration Project uses a science-based approach to managing ecosystems to protect biodiversity and to create sustainable human development, while adding to the world’s knowledge through discovery, including the greatest story on Earth: human evolution. Science is the centre.”

About the award and Half-Earth Day

The E.O. Wilson Legacy Award for Transformative Conservation Leadership was established by the E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation in 2025. It recognizes exceptional leadership in scientific contribution to biodiversity conservation, public engagement, and movement mobilization that leads to measurable conservation outcomes. The award reflects Wilson’s conviction that “to strive against odds on behalf of all life would be humanity at its most noble.”

Half-Earth Day 2026 marked ten years since Wilson launched the Half-Earth movement, his call to protect half the planet’s land and sea for the rest of life. This year’s event was co-hosted by the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University Herbaria, the Harvard University Native American Program, the Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability at Harvard University, and the E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation.

Edward O. Wilson (1929–2021) was a Harvard biologist, the world’s leading authority on ants, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, the winner of the National Medal of Science, and often called the father of biodiversity. When describing him, Carr said, “Ed Wilson was a great man, but he was also a good man. And it’s not that often that those two traits come together in the same person.”

Source: Gorongosa National Park / Press Release