The Trump administration is rolling back protections for endangered species. Countries around the world are failing to deliver on their conservation commitments. Corporations are backpedaling on environmental pledges.

Still, 100 imperiled animals and plants got some good news on Tuesday.

A new fund called the Phoenix Species Project said it would pump $200 million into efforts to pull these animals and plants back from the brink of extinction and even restore them in the wild. It’s among the largest philanthropic funds focused entirely on species recovery and it stands out for both the scope and specificity of the wildlife included.

The project is a collaboration between Re:wild, a nonprofit group co-founded by the actor Leonardo DiCaprio, and the Bezos Earth Fund, a private foundation created by Jeff Bezos, the billionaire behind Amazon.

The move comes amid alarming declines in global biodiversity, meaning the variety of life on the planet. Species and ecosystems are shrinking as humans plow, pave and mine the earth’s land, pollute its rivers and pull fish from its oceans. Climate change is adding new pressure. Human consumption — of food, energy and countless material goods — is ultimately to blame.

The hundred species were chosen because they were near extinction, had local organizations already working to save them and represent a diversity of habitats, countries and types of species.

There’s the Hickory Nut Gorge green salamander in North Carolina, whose already dwindling habitat was largely leveled by mudslides from the remnants of Hurricane Helene in 2024. There’s a charming plant in South Africa called the fuzzy belly button whose sudden popularity as houseplants, particularly in East Asia, has driven it to near extinction in the wild. And there’s the bowmouth guitarfish in the Indo-Pacific, which looks like a cross between a ray and a shark and is killed for its prized fins.

“Even species down to very small numbers have been able to recover with the right resources, the right partners on the ground,” said Wes Sechrest, co-founder and chief executive of Re:wild.

For some species, the money will unlock resources that should make recovery relatively straightforward, Dr. Sechrest said. Others, like Mexico’s vaquita porpoise, face far more challenging paths.

Julia P.G. Jones, a professor of conservation science at Bangor University in Wales whose research seeks to make environmental efforts more effective, welcomed the sizable donations. And she said that broader, system-level changes were also needed to ensure that wild nature and people can thrive into the future.

“While species conservation can win some battles, we risk losing the war without bigger changes to how we use our environment,” Dr. Jones said.

Take Mr. Bezos’ company, Amazon. Last week, it reached No. 1 on the Fortune Global 500 list of the largest companies. But its enormous sales are helping fuel the very problems that conservationists are left trying to solve.

“Amazon, like other big multinational corporations, is driving habitat loss and extinction through massive consumerism,” said Brian O’Donnell, who runs a nature advocacy group that has received money from the Bezos Earth Fund. He emphasized his admiration for the people there, praising their good work and noting his excitement for this latest effort.

“Does it fully offset their responsibility?” he continued. “No, but this is a really cool fund that is super needed.”

Amazon’s emissions have been going up in recent years, even though it helped start the Climate Pledge in 2019, promising to reach net-zero emissions by 2040. A spokesperson for the company said supply chain emissions and artificial intelligence were largely responsible for the rise but said Amazon remains committed to achieving its pledge.

The Bezos Earth Fund declined to make Mr. Bezos available for an interview. Tom Taylor, who worked at Amazon as a senior executive for more than 20 years and is now chief executive of the Bezos Earth Fund, acknowledged that companies must do far more to improve sustainability.

At the same time, he noted that consumers play an important role. Yes, Amazon makes it easy to buy stuff, he said, “but each of us individually have responsibility to make the decisions we make.”

Beneath the economic and political dynamics are the local groups fighting to stave off extinctions, who say this influx of money is going to make a big difference.

For the Hickory Nut Gorge green salamander, it will mean boosting numbers in a captive breeding program and restoring habitat lost to the storm and invasive tree diseases so that the salamanders can be returned to the wild, said JJ Apodaca, executive director of the Amphibian and Reptile Conservancy, which will be receiving a grant from the new fund.

“It gives us a real chance of success that we wouldn’t have had otherwise,” Dr. Apodaca said.

For the fuzzy belly button plant, a succulent that has lost more than two-thirds of its population to harvesting since 2019, when it became very popular abroad, the money will allow conservationists to breed more plants in captivity, buy trail cameras for security and fund work with communities so the plant can be returned to the wild without getting overharvested again, said Domitilla Raimondo, the threatened species program manager at the South African National Biodiversity Institute.

“They’re not as charismatic as a panda bear or a rhino, so they don’t tend to get the love and attention that other species get,” she said. “What is really great about this Phoenix recovery plan is it’s giving equal love to different species.”

Still, it includes only three invertebrates, among them a snail in Tahiti, and no insects.

Vivek Menon, chair of the Species Survival Commission at the International Union for Conservation of Nature, said the 100 species were a “fantastic first step” and emphasized the need to scale quickly.

More than 11,000 species are classified as either critically endangered or extinct in the wild on the I.U.C.N. Red List, the leading global scientific authority on the status of species. Almost 40,000 more are endangered or vulnerable.