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Leonardo DiCaprio's Charity Has Raised More Than $80m To Save The World's Wildlands

Leonardo DiCaprio's Charity Has Raised More Than $80m To Save The World's Wildlands

He set up the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation back in 1998, right on the back of his success with ​'Titanic'​.

James Dawson

James Dawson

Leo DiCaprio is one of those blokes who seems to have everything: he's one of the world most famous actors, fantastically rich and regularly ranked among the sexiest men on the planet.

He's got it made, to say the least, and as he turns 43 today - Happy Birthday Leo! - we thought we'd celebrate him a little bit.

Not for his sterling performance in Romeo + Juliet back in 1997, though it did help us all pass our GCSE English by making Shakespeare interesting, not for his award-winning performances in The Wolf of Wall Street, Catch Me If You Can, The Aviator, Revolutionary Road, The Departed, Blood Diamond - you get the point, we could go on - and not even for battering the shite out of that bear in The Revenant, however. We want to pay tribute to his charity work.

Credit: PA

Leo is known as an activist and environmentalist, as anyone who has seen him pick up any of those aforementioned awards will know, as he rarely misses an opportunity to mention it on any public stage.

He's addressed the United Nations, no less, and held meetings with everyone from Pope Francis to Vladimir Putin and Al Gore, as well as donating huge sums of money to environmental causes all over the world. While this public face is well known, behind the scenes, Leo is if anything more generous.

He set up the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation back in 1998, right on the back of his success with Titanic, to fight for environmental justice, and it has raised a staggering $80 million (£60m) in the near twenty years of its existence.

The Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation states its goal as 'protecting the world's last wild places', and has 6 key areas of activity: Wildlands Conservation, Oceans Conservation, Climate Change, Indigenous Rights, Transforming California, and Innovative Solutions.

Credit: PA

With that in mind, let's look through a few of their achievements. They save wild tigers in Nepal and protect the parks of Borneo, they defend indigenous rights from the Amazon to Alaska, helping Native Americans and First Nations people to preserve their culture, they monitor fishing and whaling to save marine life and they develop new and innovative solutions to assist in the fight against climate change.

It can be pretty easy for superstars to sit back on their fortunes and lap up all the acclaim, but Leo isn't like that. In a time when the men of Hollywood are hardly covering themselves in glory, we're happy to give one of them a big hand for doing something decent.

So happy birthday, Leo. Keep saving the ice caps, unless someone crashes a boat that you're on into one and you end up floating on a door in the freezing sea.

Featured Image Credit: PA

Topics: TV and Film, US Entertainment, Leonardo DiCaprio