Community Meeting Notes: Land protection

As part of its strategic planning process WPF held twelve facilitated meetings, involving nearly 150 civic leaders, practitioners, public officials, and subject-matter experts in areas related to our grantmaking.

The following are notes taken at a meeting held on November 10, 2011 to discuss WPF's future grantmaking related to land protection.

Individuals participated with the understanding that they were speaking without attribution, so their names are intentionally omitted from these notes.

Meeting Purpose and Questions

The Foundation’s Environment & Communities Program takes an integrated, systems approach to its grantmaking in its efforts to advance regional prosperity and economic competitiveness in Greater Philadelphia.  This approach recognizes the importance of both revitalizing our urban core and protecting our natural assets, which we define key waterways and landscapes. 

Since 2007, the Foundation has targeted its landscape protection grantmaking to the Pennsylvania Highlands, the Delaware Bayshore and the Pinelands, because they are 1) regionally or hemispherically significant; 2) largely intact landscapes that drain to key Delaware basin waterways; and 3) places where there is strong conservation leadership.  Within these landscapes, we concentrate programmatic and capital grants (the latter in the Highlands and Bayshore only) in priority project areas where there is the potential for catalytic, high-impact work; collaboration; and measurable success. 

We invited representatives of the field to discuss how to move forward with landscape protection in an environment that will be shaped by fiscal stress, enormous growth in the energy sector, increasing demands on water supply, escalating interest in access to locally grown food, and changing demographics.

Our questions included:  What has to be achieved in the next ten years to make meaningful progress? What indicators will trigger a change in strategies--by the Foundation and others? What are emerging threats and promising opportunities, particularly in the face of declining public funding for land acquisition and an increasingly hostile regulatory environment?  What are new constituencies we should engage to broaden support for watershed conservation?

Major Points from the Discussion

The connection of land conservation to the protection of water quality and supply. Much of the discussion was about the impact of development and agriculture on water quality, and the need, going forward, to more explicitly tie landscape preservation to its role in protecting water.  Issues include: the pervasiveness and difficulty in dealing with nonpoint-source pollution, the importance of water to biodiversity as well as human productive enterprise, increasing awareness of municipalities of the value of protecting distant water sources, and the huge regulatory structure around water protection and use, which can be an effective driver of land conservation.  In addition, there is a need for a metrics system to help quantify the “end game” in specific places---ie, how much land is needed to protect the health of individual watersheds? 

Role of public, private, and nonprofit sectors. The changing role of government in the protection of land and water was discussed, noting that because of fiscal stress and politics, it is unlikely that government at any level will lead land and water protection efforts in the ways the public sector has over the past four decades.  In this context, the private and nonprofit sectors need to step up to model environmental protection, to both address threats, such as sea level rise, and take advantage of opportunities, such as changes in industrial practices that promote conservation, and connecting local farms with larger regional markets. 

Climate Change. There was discussion about the role that land preservation can play to help protect the region from the impacts of climate change—specifically rising sea level, storms, and flooding.  The participants felt that the region is not considering the potential impact of climate change, and that it will likely be significant.

Guidance to WPF

Nonprofit sector. Remember that land trusts are responsible for protecting land in perpetuity, so support needs to help their capacity to be sustained and enable them to restore and be stewards of the land. Encourage nonprofits to work with the private and public sectors.

Work with those involved with other environmental issues. Tie land preservation to water protection, food access, healthy communities—especially in urban areas.    Consider the impact of climate change and how land protection can help mitigate the effects.  Consider what is needed for behavioral change.

Delaware River watershed. Expand WPF grantmaking to the entire Delaware River watershed (the E&C grantmaking area currently covers the lower half of the watershed).  These issues affect the entire Delaware Basin, and the Delaware River Basin Commission and state agencies would be willing partners in work in this expanded region.  Engage people in urban areas too, especially Philadelphia, which has a rich tradition of public parks.

Support advocacy.  On-the-ground conservation is most effective when it is done in the context of larger policy goals (eg, clean water, regional recreation, etc).  This requires on-going advocacy.

Metrics. Help develop measures of the need for and impact of land protection.  Assess the economic impact of environmental protection.  Use metrics and analysis to simplify on the “other side” of complexity to make the case and tell the story.