Funding Priority: Protect and Conserve Significant Regional Landscapes
Greater Philadelphia’s distinctive natural, agricultural, and urban landscapes are key regional assets. The goals of the Environment & Communities program’s landscape priority are to advance strategic conservation of critical open space and natural areas in four of the region’s largest, intact landscapes, each of which is of national or international importance, and to promote public access to the region’s two largest rivers.
We advance this priority through support for work that addresses two objectives:
Increasing public and private resources available for permanent protection of land through policy advocacy and innovative approaches to conservation finance; and
Accelerating the permanent protection of land and decelerating consumption of land in six targeted, strategic landscapes in Pennsylvania and New Jersey through innovative planning, practice, and acquisition. The six targeted landscapes are: 1) the Delaware River Corridor; 2) the Schuylkill River Corridor; 3) the New Jersey Pinelands; 4) the South Jersey Bayshore; 5) the Pennsylvania Highlands; and 6) the Eastern Lancaster/Western Chester County farm belt.
