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About This Report
This report shows how land trusts, conservancies, and other civic sector organizations (both nonprofit and nongovernmental) around the globe are addressing climate change. Often working in partnership with others—local, state, and national governments; private sector organizations; universities and research institutions; religious groups; and Indigenous peoples—land trusts and conservancies are effectively designing, demonstrating, and widely deploying innovative responses to climate change. These civic sector entities are conserving land, protecting water supplies, managing stormwater and sea-level rise, maintaining biodiversity, supporting renewable energy facility siting, and sequestering carbon. By sharing examples of innovative and effective initiatives, this report demonstrates that land trusts and conservancies can act quickly and flexibly at all levels, from local to global. These initiatives serve as proofof- concept models characterized by novel and creative concepts, strategic and measurable significance, crossboundary transferability, and the ability to endure.
The research contributing to this report includes interviews with practitioners, program staff, decision makers, and citizens from six continents; the composition, vetting, and editing of working papers and case profiles; in-depth bibliographic research; online webinars and dialogues conducted by Lincoln Institute of Land Policy staff members and our partners around the world; and research seminars held between 2018 and 2021. The report offers policy recommendations to improve the effectiveness and participation of civic sector land conservation organizations in such initiatives. The lessons learned have global relevance and will be disseminated through webinars, publications, regional meetings, and Global Congresses of the International Land Conservation Network, a program of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, as well as through the convenings of our colleagues and partner organizations.
Policy Focus Report Series
The Policy Focus Report series is published by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy to address timely public policy issues relating to land use, land markets, and property taxation. Each report is designed to bridge the gap between theory and practice by combining research findings, case studies, and contributions from scholars in a variety of academic disciplines, and from professional practitioners, local officials, and citizens in diverse communities.
Executive Summary
This Policy Focus Report presents a dozen case studies that demonstrate how land trusts, conservancies, and other nongovernmental organizations in the civic sector have meaningfully addressed climate change over the past several decades. These organizations are working to protect land, biodiversity, and historic resources in more than 100 countries on six continents. They work in partnership with public agencies as well as private companies, other nonprofits, colleges and universities, and Indigenous communities. They offer largely nature-based solutions that are conceptually creative, measurably effective, strategically significant, transferable, and potentially enduring. These civic sector entities often add continuity to projects that may take decades to fully implement, especially as political leadership and attention can fluctuate dramatically from year to year.
The long-predicted disruptive impacts of human-induced climate change are now upon us, often with disastrous consequences. In Canada, record-breaking summer temperatures related to climate change (World Weather Attribution 2021) have set the stage for unprecedented forest fires, such as the one that consumed 90 percent of Lytton, British Columbia, in one day in 2021 (Isai 2021). Heat-related human deaths in the region tripled compared with previous years. In Australia, heat waves in the state of New South Wales since 2017 have led to power plant failures and forced authorities to urgently cut demand (Knaus 2017). In China, millions of people living along the Yangtze River risk landslides and inundations due to increasingly intense storms such as those reported in July 2020 that caused economic damages exceeding USD $8 billion (Stanway 2020).
No single sector of the economy—public, private, or civic—has the resources, will, or tools to confront climate change alone. Droughts, floods, wildfires, water scarcity, extreme temperatures, intense storms, energy sprawl, falling agricultural productivity, an epochal decline in biodiversity, and other related issues require cross-sector solutions. As a parade of public figures have reiterated—from U.S. President Joe Biden to World Bank economists Stéphane Hallegate and Julie Rozenberg—this global crisis requires “all hands on deck” (Hallegate 2019, Ritter 2021).
This report illustrates the capacity and determination of land conservation groups working across large areas and long periods of time. It also recommends ways practitioners, funders, and decision makers can enhance and accelerate civic organizations’ efforts to address daunting challenges in the age of climate change.
Consider one example of the many offered in this report. Rocco Buchta was born in 1965 in the East German town of Strohdehne, near Berlin. As a boy,
he spent long, happy hours outdoors fishing with his grandfather, who was born in 1904. His grandfather told the boy how green and full of wildlife the town was during his own childhood, before the Havel River was channelized to allow for more barge traffic. Buchta promised his grandfather that he would someday re- store the local wetlands along the Lower Havel to their former natural glory.
Following German reunification in 1989, Buchta began to make good on his promise to his grandfather. By that time he had earned an advanced degree in engineering and was working for NABU (Naturschutzbund Deutschland, or the Nature and Biodiversity Conserva- tion Union of Germany), one of the nation’s largest civic sector conservation organizations. After nearly three decades of dedicated work, a 56-mile (90-km) stretch of the Lower Havel River has largely been restored thanks to the leadership of NABU, where Buchta is now project manager of the Institute for River and Floodplain Ecology (Institut für Fluss- und Auenökologie). The project restored thousands of hectares of wildlife habitat, increased capacity to manage storm- water, improved water quality, and restored alluvial forests that sequester carbon and offer tree cover— effectively reducing the heat island effect. In recent years, conservationists from Holland, England, Korea, Russia, and other countries have visited the site to consider how to replicate the Havel River restoration far and wide (Strodehne 2019).
This and other case studies highlighted in this re- port—from the restoration of highlands supplying fresh water from Bogotá and Quito, to the reforestation of Chinese deserts and the greening of urban Baltimore County, Maryland—show how civic sector land conservation initiatives are providing critical nature-based solutions to climate change.
As impressive as these examples may be, the reader should be aware of several important caveats:
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Initiatives such as NABU’s Havel River work
can take many years and require navigating a multitude of regulatory, financial, political, and organizational obstacles. Many such initiatives fail to reach their ultimate objective due to lack of money, political will, organizational endurance, leadership, and other factors. Some initiatives may ultimately succeed but require multiple re- organizations before they reach their goals, trying the patience of even the most passionate and dedicated project proponents.
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Many such civic sector initiatives are launched with the implicit or explicit support of local, state, or national governments and multilateral organizations. This support may include laws and policies that enable conservation easements and covenants, ecosystem service and carbon credit markets, and incentives for sustainable land stewardship. Land trust and conservancy leaders and members often must advocate for such government policies and programs. Lacking such engagement, government incentives for land conservation may languish or disappear.
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Some of the practices that currently support civic sector participation in land conservation are still evolving, and in some cases their use and regula- tion are being vigorously debated. One prominent case is the spectrum of carbon credit markets across many jurisdictions. Uncertainty remains over how these markets can appropriately deal with the challenges of permanence, leakage, and additionality. To preserve public trust, conservation groups will benefit by working with certified offset programs and by following, where applicable, national and regional standards and recommended practices.
Acknowledging these issues, well-organized and stra- tegically motivated nonprofits and nongovernmental organizations remain capable of addressing the climate crisis in unique and effective ways. Accordingly, many organizations are greatly expanding the scale and scope of their climate-related ambitions. The community of land conservation organizations around the world is in the early stages of forming a global network. Members of the community are eager to learn from one another about potential solutions to the difficult and pervasive challenges associated with climate change.
Public officials, citizens, civic sector leaders and practitioners, educators, and advocates can take steps to substantially deepen the impact of this work. These steps include:
1. Empower civic sector initiatives that are creative and ambitious in scope and scale.
2. Invest in initiatives with clear strategies and measurable impacts.
3. Aim for broad collaborations.
4. Share advanced science, technologies, and financ- ing techniques.
5. Support initiatives that are resilient, adaptable, and replicable.
The recommendations in this report can help policy makers and practitioners better understand the potential for land trusts and conservancies to provide effective solutions and leverage their innovation as we mobilize globally to fight climate change.
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"Civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice." -- Will Durant
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