LONDON — How does a grizzly bear safely cross a busy highway? Increasingly, the answer relies not on the instincts of the animal alone, but on a collaborative, cross-border choreography orchestrated by Indigenous communities, ranchers, local governments, and conservationists.
This model of cooperative environmental stewardship is the heartbeat of the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative (Y2Y), a transboundary charity dedicated to preserving the Rocky Mountains as an unbroken, unfettered migration corridor stretching all the way from Wyoming to northwestern Canada. By uniting disparate stakeholders across international boundaries, Y2Y has spent over three decades working to protect vital wild lands, install specialized wildlife overpasses and underpasses, and erect targeted fencing to safeguard both fauna and motorists.
Now, this ambitious vision of continental rewilding has captured global attention. On Friday, Y2Y was named one of the 15 elite finalists for the prestigious 2026 Earthshot Prize. Established in 2020 by Britain’s Prince William, the Earthshot Prize aims to spotlight, fund, and scale groundbreaking solutions developed by conservationists and entrepreneurs to combat climate change, severe pollution, rapid habitat loss, and other existential environmental threats.
The stakes are high: winners across five distinct categories will each be awarded £1 million (approximately $1.34 million USD), alongside bespoke technical assistance designed to rapidly expand the footprint and impact of their projects. The ultimate victors will be officially unveiled on November 17 during a high-profile, televised awards ceremony in Mumbai, India.
Executive Overview: A Global Spotlight on Grassroots Conservation
Prince William launched the Earthshot Prize with an explicit blueprint inspired by U.S. President John F. Kennedy’s historic 1962 "Moonshot" speech, which famously challenged the United States to land a man on the moon before the decade was out. The prince’s modern analogue seeks to harness that same spirit of urgent, accelerated innovation to "repair the planet" by 2030.
Y2Y stands out among this year’s global cohort because its methodology bridges deep ecological science with boots-on-the-ground community diplomacy. Operating across the political divide of the United States and Canada, the initiative proves that ecological health does not respect human borders.
Jason Knauf, chief executive of the Earthshot Prize, emphasized that finalists like Y2Y actively work to transcend geopolitical friction—such as the trade disputes and political posturing that occasionally strain relations between Ottawa and Washington.
"People want to protect nature for the sake of future generations. That is what the vast majority of people want in the U.S., in Canada, and everywhere in the world," Knauf said during the announcement. "This is a really, really popular agenda, and we cannot allow ourselves to get distracted by short-term political noise, as noisy as it may be."
Y2Y shares this year’s global stage with an array of cutting-edge environmental interventions. Other nominees include an innovative Argentine project leveraging artificial intelligence and satellite data to detect and track wildfires across Latin America; the Zero Emission Maritime Buyers Alliance (ZEMBA), which seeks to decarbonize international shipping corridors; and Ørsted, one of the world’s preeminent developers of offshore wind infrastructure.
Detailed Chronology: Thirty Years of Stitching the Rockies Back Together
The journey of the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative is rooted in a bold premise first conceptualized in the early 1990s. Headquartered in Canmore, Alberta, with a corresponding U.S. operational hub in Bozeman, Montana, Y2Y has spent the last three decades systematically pursuing a single, expansive goal: creating an interconnected, functioning network of wild lands and waterways along the majestic spine of the Rocky Mountains.
The Inception (1993)
In 1993, a gathering of scientists, conservationists, and outdoor advocates met to address a troubling ecological reality. Fragmentation was slowly killing the interior West. Roads, railways, clear-cuts, and residential developments were carving up continuous wilderness into isolated islands. Populations of large carnivores—such as grizzly bears, wolverines, and wolves—were suffering from inbreeding depression and local extinctions because they could no longer safely disperse across their historic ranges.
The founders of Y2Y asked a radical question: What if we treated the entire 2,000-mile (3,200-kilometer) stretch from Yellowstone National Park to the Yukon Territory as a single, unified ecosystem?
Building the Coalition (2000s–2010s)
Moving from a conceptual map to operational reality required forging unexpected alliances. Conservationists realized that preserving the Rockies could not be achieved by locking the gates and excluding humans. Instead, Y2Y leaned into community-based conservation.
The organization began working hand-in-hand with cattle ranchers to implement conflict-reduction techniques, such as range-riding, electric fencing, and removing livestock attractants, ensuring that apex predators could pass through private lands without threatening local livelihoods. Concurrently, Y2Y partnered with Indigenous nations, supporting their traditional ecological knowledge and self-determined plans for creating and managing tribal and First Nations protected areas.
The Engineering Era (Present Day)
Over the past decade, Y2Y’s focus has increasingly incorporated civil engineering. Recognizing that roads are absolute hard barriers for wildlife, the organization has collaborated with state, provincial, and federal departments of transportation to identify high-mortality collision zones. By lobbying for and helping design wildlife overpasses—lushly planted bridges spanning roaring multi-lane highways—and subterranean underpasses, Y2Y has transformed lethal asphalt strips back into permeable corridors.
Supporting Context & Metrics: The Scale of Success
The numbers behind the Yellowstone to Yukon initiative illustrate a staggering scale of ambition matched by tangible ecological recovery. As human development continues to press against the edges of the wild, Y2Y and its hundreds of partner organizations have measurable victories to show for their 30-year campaign.
Key Metrics and Environmental Milestones:
- 204 Wildlife Crossings: Across the corridor spanning from Wyoming to the Yukon Territory, there are now 204 engineered wildlife overpasses and underpasses facilitating safe passage.
- 24 Million Hectares Protected: Approximately 24 million hectares (roughly 59 million acres) of public, private, and Indigenous-managed lands within the Y2Y region now enjoy enhanced legal protection or conservation status.
- Genetic Resilience: Scientific monitoring has confirmed that grizzly bears and other wide-ranging mammals are utilizing these pathways to cross major infrastructure like the Trans-Canada Highway in Banff National Park, maintaining crucial gene flow between northern and southern populations.
Competing on the Global Stage: The 2026 Earthshot Finalists
To appreciate the magnitude of Y2Y’s Earthshot nomination, it is vital to understand the breadth of systemic challenges being addressed by its fellow finalists. While Y2Y tackles terrestrial habitat fragmentation, other finalists are deploying high-tech software and heavy industry reforms:
- Latin American Wildfire Tracking (Argentina): Using real-time satellite data and proprietary AI models to predict, spot, and suppress blazes before they ravage fragile carbon sinks.
- Maritime Decarbonization (ZEMBA): Aggregating cargo owner demand to make zero-emission ocean shipping commercially viable and economically competitive.
- Offshore Wind Scaling (Ørsted): Engineering utility-scale renewable energy generation to permanently displace fossil-fuel baseload power.
Official Statements and Perspectives
The philosophy underpinning Y2Y’s success is rooted in inclusivity and the recognition that top-down edicts rarely survive the realities of rural landscapes.
Dr. Jodi Hilty, president and chief scientist of the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative, articulated this philosophy in a compelling video statement released following the Earthshot announcement. She stressed that the formula for reversing habitat loss is remarkably straightforward once human division is pushed aside.
"The solution is surprisingly simple," Hilty noted. "Animals need space to move, and they don’t recognize borders. So we bring people together in this landscape to the same table… We work with them all to come up with the solution in order for animals to be able to move freely across the landscape."
Hilty highlighted that Y2Y’s daily operations involve painstaking, localized mediation: collaborating directly with state and provincial governments to pinpoint where wildlife crossings are most desperately needed; consulting local ranchers to mitigate the economic friction between livestock production and predator presence; and championing Indigenous-led conservation frameworks that have successfully managed these ecosystems for millennia.
Echoing this sentiment, Earthshot Prize CEO Jason Knauf underscored that grassroots environmental movements represent a unifying cultural force across the North American continent, impervious to transient political cycles.
"This is a really, really popular agenda," Knauf reiterated, pointing out that citizens from Montana to Alberta share a fundamental desire to preserve the natural heritage of the Rockies for their children and grandchildren.
Future Outlook: The Road Ahead for Continental Conservation
As the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative looks toward the November 17 Earthshot Prize ceremony in Mumbai, the organization is already planning its next strategic chapter.
Securing the £1 million prize would provide Y2Y with a transformative financial injection, accelerating plans to address remaining ecological bottlenecks. Despite decades of progress, several critical pinch points remain where rapid commercial development, resource extraction, and expanding transportation networks threaten to sever the corridor permanently.
Chief among future priorities is the expansion of climate-resilient corridors. As global temperatures rise, species are not merely migrating laterally across landscapes; they are seeking higher elevations and cooler northern latitudes to escape warming lowlands. Ensuring that the Rocky Mountains remain permeable is no longer just about preserving historical migration routes—it is an essential climate adaptation strategy that gives wildlife a fighting chance to adapt to a rapidly shifting biosphere.
Furthermore, Y2Y aims to deepen its reliance on Indigenous-led conservation models. Across Canada and the United States, Indigenous communities are asserting stewardship over ancestral lands through Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas (IPCAs). By centering Indigenous leadership, Y2Y hopes to secure long-term, culturally grounded protections that outlast shifting political regimes.
If crowned an Earthshot winner this November, the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative will not only receive validation for three decades of tireless grassroots labor; it will signal to the global community that healing the fractured landscapes of our planet is possible when communities cast aside borders, sit at the same table, and work together to build a path forward—for bears, for people, and for the generations yet to come.
