Environment

The Foundation is especially close to Tusk Trust, the UK-based charity that funds conservation across Africa. Nick is one of Tusk's most committed supporters and has been a trustee since 2021.

NMF sponsors the annual Tusk Wildlife Ranger Award, which honours rangers who protect Africa's wildlife, often at great personal risk. Past winners include Amos Gwema of Zimbabwe and Suleiman Saidu of Nigeria. NMF also funds the biennial Tusk Conservation Symposium.

NMF has sponsored Tusk's international street art trails, including the Lion Trail and its gorilla and turtle trails, with sculptures by artists including John Cleese and Ronnie Wood. It matched public donations to Tusk through The Times Christmas Appeal and has held fundraising events for the charity, from New York to London.

The foundation actively works with several leading African wildlife conservationists to move at-risk rhino and elephant around the continent to locations where they will be more likely to survive, breed and live sustainably. It has supported large-scale social media campaigns to discourage the rhino horn trade and backed community led conservation initiatives across the continent.

NMF has supported dozens of other environmental charities and causes, from the Earthshot Prize to Make My Money Matter, which campaigned for pensions and savings to be invested in line with climate goals. It provided seed funding for Going Green Media and actively funds coral restoration projects and research in the Bahamas and internationally.

Every month we film the reef in the Berry Islands along the same fixed transects, from marked points, so that each survey can be compared directly with the last.

We take stills from the footage and analyse them with CoralNet to measure coral cover, bleaching and algae. Slow, overlapping passes let us build 3D models of the reef, which show changes in its structure over time.

A temperature logger on the reef records water conditions alongside the footage, so we can see how bleaching and recovery track heat stress. We share the data with researchers, adding a regularly updated record from a part of the Bahamas that is rarely surveyed.

The survey also tells us what to do next. It lets us spot disease or algal outbreaks early and call in specialist help. It shows whether the local conservation measures are working, such as moorings, wastewater controls and protecting runoff from construction.

Over time it builds the baseline needed for future restoration work and the ongoing protection of the reef.