Climate change and biodiversity loss are interlinked urgent crises. The Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, in partnership with the Network for Landscape Conservation (NLC) and the University of Montana, recently published a working paper, ‘How Landscape Conservation Partnerships Are Working to Address Climate Change’ examining how U.S. land conservation collaborative partnerships are addressing climate change. It presents effective practices and recommendations that can accelerate and broaden the benefits of landscape conservation and restoration in meeting climate goals.
And the Salazar Center’s upcoming International Symposium on Conservation Impact focuses on nature-positive solutions and how they can catapult our communities towards durable, high-impact outcomes for climate, biodiversity, and human well-being.
So, the NLC and Salazar Center teamed up to host a webinar series that highlights some of the key findings of the report as an important primer for folks interested in participating in the Symposium. We chatted with several of the contributors in this collaboration to learn more about the work at the intersection of climate and conservation.
Q: What is your role with NLC? How is your work with NLC connected to Nature-based Solutions?
Answer from Ernest Cook, Network for Landscape Conservation (NLC)
I am the Director for the Network for Landscape Conservation (NLC). NLC started over 10 years ago to develop a network of diverse and inclusive community-grounded partnerships throughout the United States and cross-border regions that conserve the resilient landscapes that sustain us all. We work to advance collaborative, community-grounded conservation at the landscape scale as an essential approach to connect and protect nature, culture, and community. For this reason, we believe that landscape conservation is a nature-based solution, looking at the landscape across jurisdictions and boundaries to adapt to the impacts of a changing land-use and natural processes due to the impacts of climate change.
To achieve this work, NLC provides a space to connect people to share and build knowledge and information. Through this work, we identify with partners their strengths and needs to inform partners and the public. This process led us to investigate the ways that diverse landscape conservation partners are addressing the impact of climate change, the challenges, share successes and highlight opportunities in this working paper. We hope this paper inspires others to mitigate and adapt to climate change at the landscape scale. The pace we feel is needed to address the challenges we face.
Q: Why did NLC and Lincoln embark on this project? What do you hope the paper will change/inspire/impact? How does the webinar series fit into that equation?
Answer from Kat Lyons, Co-Author, ‘How Landscape Conservation Partnerships Are Working to Address Climate Change’
The goal of this working paper was to explore the readiness of landscape conservation partnerships to address climate change by including mitigation and adaptation strategies in landscape conservation work. Landscape conservation initiatives collaborate with partners to implement conservation at scale however, little is known about how landscape conservation initiatives integrate climate science and/or climate mitigation and climate adaptation strategies to scale their impact.
NLC and Lincoln embarked on this project to learn more about the role of landscape conservation initiatives and share their strategies with the conservation community to stimulate changes in practices, policy, partnerships and funding to accelerate the pace and scale of climate action. We hope that this inspires others interested in climate action to consider learning from and implementing the effective landscape scale approach and design to strategically address the impact of climate, like excessive heat, flooding, and sea-level rise, all of which cross jurisdictional boundaries. We can support and accelerate change by learning from these case studies who are working with partners to scale up proven solutions across their communities.
Often when we talk about landscape conservation, we discuss a vision, a framework and a structure to implement conservation. This is all true, but to make a great impact, there is a need to address some common barriers to working with many partners at the landscape scale. In the webinar series, we are working to:
- Highlight and discuss the recommendations found in the report to address barriers these initiatives faced to advance their work to address climate impacts.
- Connect practitioners to ideas and to each other for idea creation and implementation support.
- Share the voices of practitioners in the field to inspire others to address climate impacts.
Q: How did this collaboration come about and how do the themes of the paper connect to the Symposium?
Answer from Jen Kovecses, Salazar Center for North American Conservation
The Network for Landscape Conservation are natural partners for the Salazar Center – we share similar interests, values, and goals and have worked collaboratively for several years. This spring, as the Salazar Center was finalizing our Symposium theme to focus on nature-based solutions and their contributions to climate and biodiversity goals, the NLC released the working paper on landscape conservation partnerships are tackling climate change in their work. This bit of serendipity seemed too good to pass up and so together we conceived the idea of a webinar series that would explore some of the major recommendations of the working paper as a foundation for the conversation leading into the Symposium.
Nature based solutions have long been part of the toolbox that landscape conservation partnerships use to create desired biodiversity and conservation outcomes. Understanding what strategies landscape conservation partnerships are testing to address climate change in their work is a critical component of meeting the twin crises of climate change and biodiversity loss. Symposium 2023 will expand on this conversation by exploring multiple facets of how practitioners, researchers, policymakers, the private sector, and funders are integrating nature-based solutions into their work. How do we make sure that as we collectively incorporate more nature into our climate solutions that the costs and benefits are equitably shared? Can nature-based solutions be a driver for truly transforming our social, economic, policy, and ecosystems to meet the challenges posed by climate change and biodiversity loss? What role does the private sector play in solving these twin crises? These are just a few of the themes we will collectively explore during Symposium 2023 – we hope you will join us in the conversation!
Interested in learning more? Watch the webinar recordings and register for upcoming events. And be sure to join us for the Salazar Center’s International Symposium on Conservation Impact this October in Denver, Colorado. Registration is now open!