Here are some of the key findings from a yearlong BuzzFeed News investigation carried out in 2019 across six countries — based on more than 100 interviews and thousands of pages of documents, including confidential memos, internal budgets, and emails discussing weapons purchases:

• Villagers have been whipped with belts, attacked with machetes, beaten unconscious with bamboo sticks, sexually assaulted, shot, and murdered by WWF-supported anti-poaching units, according to reports and documents obtained by BuzzFeed News.

• The charity’s field staff in Asia and Africa have organized anti-poaching missions with notoriously vicious shock troops, and signed off on a proposal to kill trespassers penned by a park director who presided over the killings of dozens of people.

• WWF has provided paramilitary forces with salaries, training, and supplies — including knives, night vision binoculars, riot gear, and batons — and funded raids on villages. In one African country, it embroiled itself in a botched arms deal to buy assault rifles from a brutal army that has paraded the streets with the severed heads of alleged “criminals.”

• The charity has operated like a global spymaster, organizing, financing, and running dangerous and secretive networks of informants motivated by “fear” and “revenge,” including within indigenous communities, to provide park officials with intelligence — all while publicly denying working with informants. - BuzzFeed News that it has a more-or-less normal distribution of letters. making it look like readable English.

The report’s key findings:

1. WWF had knowledge of alleged human rights abuses in every protected area under review and failed to investigate credible allegations of abuse in half of those protected areas;
2. Where WWF conducted internal investigations into allegations of abuse it did so several years after those allegations came to light and only following pressure from the media and/or civil society organizations (CSOs);
3. WWF continued to fund, train and equip ecoguards alleged to have committed human rights abuses despite knowledge of those allegations and without operationalizing its own human rights protocols or the safeguards identified to mitigate the human rights risks uncovered by its internal investigations.
4. WWF support to militarized security forces included the provision of high-tech enforcement equipment, cash, and weapons.
5. In those protected areas where WWF had supported their creation or proposed creation, it failed to ensure the effective participation of affected indigenous peoples and local communities (IPLCs), and was directly involved in violating indigenous people’s free, prior and informed consent (FPIC) rights.
6. Violating international human rights and our own policies, WWF failed to meaningfully consult and directly involve IPLCs in the creation and management of human rights commitments; 
7. The Panel found no agreement in place between WWF and the local authorities responsible for park administration to ensure the upholding of the human rights and FPIC rights of IPLCS.

- Minority Rights Group International

From the scale and severity of these abuses and violence it is clear that such issues are not episodic incidents but they’re part of a larger systemic problem that has been shaping WWF work around the world for many years. These include the systematic eviction of indigenous people from their customary lands and their exclusion from leadership positions in local conservation projects. This doesn’t happen everywhere: When local communities are strong, well-organised, armed or big, conservationists usually collaborate with them, as they do in Latin America. The exclusion of local communities is covered-up through co-option of few selected individuals: our partners told us that WWF controls and manipulates the “consent” processes with locals, including by getting them to sign contracts in languages they don’t speak and offering direct and indirect bribes to key individuals. Given the levels of violence on some projects, many local people are afraid to speak up.

AFRICA: THE BAKA PEOPLE

INDIA: KAZIRANGA NATIONAL PARK