This year the annual Land Trust Alliance Rally, appropriately held in the progressive city of Portland Oregon, has a new focus: Climate Change. Specifically, the topic of discussion on everyone’s mind is: What should land trusts be doing to address climate change and adapt to an uncertain future? Like all of us, the consensus among this group of environmental professionals is that they have to act now to re-think current models and business strategies, and to do that they must collaborate and participate in shared learning. And from the range of discussion panels and input from land trusts around the nation, the answer to what to do appears to be as varied and multi-faceted as the land trusts themselves.
Hot Climate Cool Conservation
One of the key discussions focused on how open space and conservation efforts will need to be retooled in the face of Climate Change. This discussion, led by Andy Pitz of the Natural Land Trust (PA), focused on new ways to strategically approach land conservation. One of the major themes here and in several other discussions was the need for land trusts to begin thinking at the landscape level in terms of resilience and resistance of conservation holdings in terms of size, connectivity and management styles. One tool useful in prioritizing at such a large level is representation, or the focus on ecological land units rather than resource management. Prioritization of conservation efforts based on ecological land units relates the richness of elevation, geology and topography to the ability of land to accommodate biological diversity in the face of habitat change; or as Andy put it, “Protect arenas for evolution, not museums of the past”. As habitat ranges shift the need for connectivity of greenbelts and other preserved lands will become increasingly important to allow population movement and protected migration corridors. Other effects of climate change, such as extreme weather events, will also require new thinking, such as redefining the adequacy of existing riparian buffers. The final recommendation boils down to hedging your bets and making sure your eggs aren’t all in one basket. This discussion concluded with the idea that strategic land conservation strategies need to include focused efforts to ensure that land protection efforts include distributed risks across geographically distributed areas and habitat types. To accomplish this, land trusts will need to collaborate with one another and with other agencies to protect a range of habitats and the potential habitats of tomorrow.
Carbon and Conservation
A very different type of discussion was also occurring at the Rally; addressing the role of land trusts in the carbon market, the implementation of carbon projects, and the legal instruments needed for these transactions. The program development and legal arm of Ducks Unlimited (DU) discussed how they have been able to enter this emerging market by repackaging their existing conservation and restoration efforts into units of exchange, and by working within the market to assign a value to the public good provided by their wetland and water quality projects. DU has successfully entered the ecosystem services market and is actively selling carbon credits in the voluntary market and establishing procedures and standards to prepare themselves to enter the compliance market with their stock of off-sets once cap-and-trade legislation is adopted. Even with a voluntary carbon off-set market that is less than 3% of the potential compliance market, the carbon market has emerged for DU and other land trusts as a viable new Conservation Finance tool for projects such as afforestation, improved forest management, reduced emissions for deforestation and degradation (REDD), and soil management through grassland and rangeland conservation. Although still in flux pending federal legislation, this is recognized as an emerging market to facilitate and fund a range of conservation projects which restore the carbon sequestration potential of a site or protect it from degradation.
