The Lincoln Institute provides a variety of early- and mid-career fellowship opportunities for researchers. In this series, we follow up with our fellows to learn more about their work.

As the director of The Nature Conservancy’s North America Center for Resilient Conservation Science, ecologist Mark Anderson led a team of scientists in the development and mapping of TNC’s resilient and connected network: a detailed, nationwide map of linked landscapes that are uniquely suited to preserve biodiversity and withstand the impacts of climate change. In 2021, Anderson received the Kingsbury Browne Conservation Leadership Award and Fellowship, named for the Boston lawyer and former Lincoln Institute fellow whose work led to the creation of the Land Trust Alliance. In this interview, which has been condensed and edited for clarity, he explains why connected natural strongholds are critical to combating our biodiversity crisis.

JON GOREY: What is the focus of your research?

MARK ANDERSON: Conservation of land and water is extremely expensive, and it’s long term. What we’ve really been focused on is making sure we’re conserving places that are resilient to climate change—really thinking about biodiversity loss, and where are the places on the ground or in the water that we think will continue to sustain nature, even as the climate changes in ways that we can’t fully predict.

As we dove deeper and deeper into the science, the beauty of it is that the properties of land and water—the topography, the soil types, the way water moves and collects—actually build resilience into the system. When you hear about a climate disaster, for example, a drought or a flood, you kind of picture it as a big swash everywhere. But in fact, there’s all sorts of detail to how that plays out on the land, and we can actually use an understanding of that to find places that are much more resilient and places that are much more vulnerable. So the effects of that are spread in understandable and predictable ways, and that’s what we are focused on: finding those places where we think nature will retain resilience.

Climate change is very different than any other threat we’ve ever faced because it’s a change in the ambient conditions of the planet. It’s a change in the temperature and moisture regimes. And in response to that change, nature literally has to rearrange. So a big question is, how do we help nature thrive and conserve the ability of nature to rearrange? Connectivity between places where species can thrive and move is key to that.

We divided the US into about 10 regions, and in each of those regions, we had a large steering committee of scientists from every state. They reviewed it, they argued about the concepts, we tested stuff out, they tested it on the ground, and that’s what improved the quality of the work, it’s all thanks to them. By the time we finished, it took 287 scientists and 12 years, so it was a lot of work. We involved a lot of people in the work, and so there’s a lot of trust now of the dataset.

JG: What are you working on now, and what are you interested in working on next?

MA: The US has not signed on to the global 30 by 30 agreement [to protect 30 percent of the world’s lands and oceans by 2030], but we have America the Beautiful, which the Biden Administration has launched as a 30 by 30 plan. People get hung up on that 30 percent, which is important, but if we want to sustain biodiversity, what’s really important is, which 30 percent is it? Are we representing all the ecosystems, are we reaching all the species? Are we finding places that are resilient, and are we connecting them in a way that nature can actually move and be sustained?

Our work is all about resilience and connectivity and biodiversity, and it turns out that the network we came up with, that has full representation of all the habitats and ecoregions and connectivity, turned out to be 34 percent [of the US]. So we have internally adopted it within TNC as our framework: We are trying to conserve that network, and that’s been super exciting. Because over the last five years, we conserved 1.1 million acres, of which about three quarters was directly in the network.

It’s very unlikely that the federal government is going to actually do the conservation; it’s really going to be done by the private NGOs, state agencies, and land trusts. In fact, in the Northeast, private land conservation over the last 10 years surpassed all the federal and state agency conservation combined. So our strategy has been to create a tool and get the science out and just encourage people to be using the science and thinking about climate resilience—with our fingers crossed that, if this makes sense to people, wherever they are, and we’re all sort of working off that, it will conserve the network in a diffuse way.

What we’re working on now is freshwater resilience, focusing on rivers and streams and the connectivity and resilience of those systems. Our vision of a resilient system is a long, connected network with good water quality that allows fish and mussels to move around and adapt to the changing climate. But a lot of those systems are fragmented by dams, their floodplains are developed, their water quality is poor, and there’s a lot of water use, because they’re in a residential area that’s extracting all the water.

JG: What do you wish more people knew about conservation, biodiversity, and ecology?

MA: Well, two things—one good, one bad. I wish more people understood the urgency of the biodiversity crisis. The fact that we’ve lost 3 billion birds—there are 3 billion fewer birds than there were 40 years ago. Our mammals are constrained now to small fragments of their original habitats. There’s a crisis in our insects, that is really scary. Most of my career, we were focused on rare things; now these are common things that are dropping in abundance. So I wish people really understood that.

And I also wish people understood that we can turn that around, by really focusing our energy and conserving the right places, and there’s still hope and time to do that. It’s a big task, and it can only be done by thousands of organizations working on it, but it can be turned around.

JG. When it comes to your work, what keeps you up at night? And what gives you hope?

MA: Well, I’m a scientist, and there are so many potential errors and problems and data issues, they never end. So our results are not perfect. They’re pretty good, they’ve been ground tested a lot, but they’re not perfect.

The other thing is the future. I really want my kids and grandkids to have a wonderful world full of nature, and to get there, we’re going to have to really change our course.

JG. What’s the most surprising thing you’ve learned in your research?

MA: When we started this work, we didn’t have a concept of what the end was going to look like. And I probably thought of the end as a bunch of big places, you know? But it’s not a bunch of big places, it’s a net, it’s a web—a web of connected places, some big, some small. So that was a surprise to me.

JG: You work a lot with maps—what’s the coolest map you’ve ever seen?

MA: We have a concept called climate flow, which is predicting how nature will move through the landscape following unfragmented areas and climatic gradients. And one of our scientists successfully animated that map, so that you can see the movement of the flows—and that is one of the coolest maps. It’s not perfectly accurate, but it gets the concept across really nicely. And it was this map that helped us figure out that there’s a pattern to all this. It’s not random, there’s a pattern—there are places where flows concentrate, there are places where flow diffuses, and that’s really important to know.

JG: What’s the best book you’ve read lately? 

MA: My favorite book recently was Wilding by Isabella Tree. It’s a nonfiction book from the British Isles, where a farming couple in Knepp, they were never able to make the area a productive farm so they decided just to stop farming it and let it go wild, and they document the change from farming to wildness. They introduce some grazing animals that would be the counterpart of the aurochs and warthogs that would have been there, and immediately, the farm becomes a total mess—lots of weeds, dug up areas, the neighbors complain. But over time, all these rare species start to show up, all these owls that have not been seen, nightingales, turtle doves, and pretty soon it is like a total biodiversity hotspot. So it’s a very interesting read, it’s very hopeful.

In the last year I’ve read several books about African American perspectives on the environmental movement, and those are powerful. One was called Black Faces, White Spaces, by Carolyn Finney, and I’m reading one now called A Darker Wilderness, and it’s really eye-opening on the equity issues that are buried in conservation.
 

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Jon Gorey is staff writer at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Lead image: Mark Anderson. Credit: Courtesy photo.

With more than 135,000 species of plants and animals, including rare and charismatic cats like Bengal tigers and snow leopards, India is an ecological treasure. Its forests, wetlands, grasslands, deserts, and other ecosystems comprise just 2.4 percent of the world’s land area, but host up to 8 percent of its biodiversity. That same land also holds over 17 percent of the world’s human population, so conservationists are looking at a variety of strategies to ensure ongoing prosperity for humans and wildlife alike. 

Protecting natural habitats is a challenge anywhere. But in a fast-growing place like India—the second-most populous country on Earth—land is under particular strain from development and agricultural pressures, and is also subject to complex legal restrictions.

To better understand those challenges, and some of the efforts to overcome them, a team from the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy’s International Land Conservation Network spent two and half weeks in India earlier this year. Their goal, says Chandni Navalkha, associate director of sustainably managed land and water at the Lincoln Institute, was to learn more about land conservation practices and policy in India, and to make connections that will support ILCN’s efforts to expand its network in Asia. Navalkha was joined by Henry Tepper, advisor to the ILCN and strategic conservation advisor at the Chilean land trust Fundación Tierra Austral, and Marc Evans, founder of the Kentucky Natural Lands Trust and advisor to the Wildlife Protection Society of India.

While private land conservation is commonplace in Western countries and throughout much of the Global South, including in several African and Latin American countries, it’s less well known and practiced in South Asian countries, Navalkha says. In India, that’s partly because of strict government regulations on private land ownership, which limit how much land an individual can own, and how that land can be used, especially when it comes to forested and agricultural lands. Nonetheless, Navalkha says, the country has an active civic conservation movement that works to complement government-led conservation efforts, which the ILCN team learned about by meeting with conservation leaders, legal experts, organizations, and networks. One such leader is Belinda Wright, a noted conservationist and executive director of the Wildlife Protection Society of India, who played a key role in connecting the ILCN team with legal experts and civic conservation practitioners and in providing important context for understanding land conservation efforts across the country.  

“What was really inspiring to us was to see that, in a unique context for civic efforts for land conservation, there were a huge number of initiatives and people who are making their best efforts using the laws and policies in place to protect the places that they love,” Navalkha says. “There’s so much good work happening, so much intact, amazing landscape and wildlife to protect.”

For example, the group visited a 40-acre forest reserve bordering Ranthambore National Park, one of the world’s best-known Bengal tiger sanctuaries. The reserve was created piece by piece, through persistence and passion, by wildlife photographer Aditya “Dicky” Singh and his wife, Poonam Singh. The couple first visited and fell in love with the area in the late 1990s; over the course of two decades, they purchased parcels of farmland bordering the national park and set about cultivating the land with native trees and shrubs, creating more habitat—and even watering holes, as the new greenery helped retain rainfall—for the park’s famed tigers.

Dicky Singh passed away unexpectedly in September, at age 57. But his efforts to celebrate and protect India’s wildlife will leave an enduring legacy. “Aditya was a passionate conservationist and photographer, whose love of wildlife is a beacon for youth in India,” says Balendu Singh, former honorary wildlife warden of Ranthambore National Park, who helped the ILCN group connect with conservationists in Rajasthan.

Land ownership is highly regulated in India, and many private and civic conservation efforts are similarly small in scale. But one sentiment the ILCN team heard repeatedly, Navalkha says, was that the country’s extraordinary biological diversity, set against a backdrop of relentless development pressure from a population of 1.4 billion and growing, “makes every effort at land conservation important, no matter how modest.”

Recognizing Informal Land Conservation

Between 7.5 percent and 22 percent of India’s land is formally protected in accordance with criteria established by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). But many additional areas could be considered conserved through a designation known as “other effective area-based conservation measures,” or OECMs.

These areas aren’t formally protected the way a national park or wildlife preserve would be, but still provide enduring conservation and biodiversity outcomes—even if protecting nature isn’t their primary objective. Examples could include a sacred grove, or the watershed around a community reservoir. Since these lands lack formal recognition as conserved spaces, they typically don’t convey clear benefits to landowners. “The concept of an OECM, ideally, is that you’re recognizing protection that already exists, but that has not been recognized or supported,” Navalkha says. “I think that’s valuable, especially in a country like India.” 

OECMs represent a fairly new approach to tabulating conserved spaces; the term was only formally defined by the Convention on Biological Diversity in 2018. But many countries are exploring the role OECMs can play in accomplishing the ambitious global conservation goal known as 30×30—a commitment to conserving 30 percent of the world’s land and oceans by 2030—which 190 nations signed on to at the United Nations COP 15 biodiversity conference in 2022. India is “really ahead of the curve working on identifying, designating, or recognizing OECMs,” Navalkha says.

One challenge, however, is that benefits to landowners and communities for their stewardship efforts are not well established or understood, crucial as they may be to the country’s conservation goals. Navalkha says some kind of incentive program could help to align the motivations of conservationists and government.

“I met three or four different people who are undertaking conservation efforts that would not meet any of the categories of the IUCN’s protected area, but may meet the criteria for an OECM. And there’s still some debate by those individuals about whether being designated as an OECM does anything for them,” Navalkha says. “What benefit does being designated give to a landowner who has helped to create this conservation area and keep it protected?”

Another takeaway from the trip, Navalkha says, was the important role that protecting wildlife—particularly tigers and elephants—plays in India’s land conservation efforts. “A lot of the conservation planning and programming is about human-wildlife conflict, and mitigating and preventing it, to protect these key species,” Navalkha says. In that context, the priorities for the landscape are different and need to be large-scale, community-centered, and multifunctional.

An Array of Approaches

Navalkha and Tepper visited several land conservation initiatives in northwestern and central India, and spoke to other practitioners while attending the fifth Central Indian Landscape Symposium, convened by the Network for Conserving Central India at Kanha National Park. These reserves varied in size, landscape, and approach—some were intended to protect wildlife or create biodiversity corridors, others focused on restoring degraded landscapes—and the team found that no two were alike, except, perhaps, for the amount of work it took to establish them.

The Singhs’ preserve was hardly the only one that took decades to establish. In the foothills of the Himalayas, for example, researcher Subir Chowfin created the Gadoli and Manda Khal Wildlife Conservation Trust to manage several hundred acres of family-owned forestland, with a focus on conservation and scientific research. It took a lengthy legal battle before Chowfin could legally manage the land for conservation purposes; in 2022, the United Nations Development Programme recognized the sanctuary as one of 14 potential OECMs in India.

Indeed, every situation the team encountered was unique. “One of the things I heard that really struck me was that, in India, there’s no such thing as a model,” Navalkha says. “No single approach is going to be replicable across states or places, as every project or initiative is navigating its own unique complexities and contexts. Every single civic land project that we saw was structured in a completely different way.”

Navalkha says she heard, often, of a need for someone to perform a legal analysis across the 28 states and eight Union territories of India to understand the role and opportunity for civil society efforts in particular places. Beyond the complex legal landscape, conservation groups also face funding challenges for land stewardship and management—and it’s not always for a lack of willing donors. Foreign funding is tightly regulated “for conservation, and for land purchase, and even for philanthropic donations,” Navalkha says.

Navalkha says the team returned from India feeling optimistic and excited about the work occurring there, and looks forward to connecting with Indian conservationists who expressed interest in engaging with the ILCN. She hopes some of them will attend ILCN’s next Global Congress, to be held in Quebec City in 2024. “This is the beauty and promise of a truly dynamic ILCN global network,” she says, “especially one with increased geographic representation.”

Jon Gorey is a staff writer at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Lead image: A Bengal tiger at Ranthambore National Park. Credit: eROMAZe via E+/Getty Images.

En sus tres décadas como director del Scenic Hudson Land Trust, Steve Rosenberg vio olas de personas mudándose de ciudades a Hudson Valley tras acontecimientos importantes: El 11 de septiembre, los huracanes Sandy e Irene, e incluso la boda de Chelsea Clinton en Rhinebeck. Así que, cuando llegó una nueva ola durante la COVID-19, parte de la gran migración de trabajadores de oficina urbanos hacia la zona rural de los Estados Unidos, no fue una gran novedad.

Pero, esta vez, las cosas fueron diferentes en Hudson Valley, un valle que corre a lo largo del río Hudson desde Nueva York hasta Albany. Los precios del suelo y los bienes raíces se dispararon, debido a la afluencia de residentes nuevos y a las presiones más amplias del mercado. En las ciudades y los pueblos de la región, el aburguesamiento había empezado a arrasar con áreas echadas a perder por mucho tiempo a causa de la falta de inversión. Como consecuencia, los residentes de bajos ingresos se sintieron desplazados, las comunidades de personas negras y mestizas se vieron amenazadas, y se dificultó la preservación y creación de viviendas asequibles.

Esta “presión intensa sobre el suelo”, dice Rosenberg, también obstaculizó el trabajo de conservación. Tan solo una década antes, los fideicomisos de suelo pudieron ensamblar con mayor facilidad tres o más parcelas de tierra para crear un área protegida continua que ayudaría a preservar el hábitat silvestre y desarrollar la resiliencia ante el cambio climático. Ahora se necesitarían entre 10 y 12 compras para poder ensamblar una cantidad comparable de superficie, y, por lo general, siempre había ofertas mejores que las de los grupos de conservación.

Debido a que competían con compradores externos por la tierra, las organizaciones de vivienda y conservación de la región enfrentaban desafíos similares, y algunas empezaron a preguntarse si podrían lograr más trabajando juntas. Al mismo tiempo, algunas organizaciones de conservación, impulsadas principalmente por el movimiento Las vidas negras importan, exploraron cómo podrían abordar mejor la justicia racial, la salud pública y la equidad climática, como parte de un tipo de conservación del suelo más centrado en la comunidad. Pero los grupos de conservación y vivienda parecían existir en mundos paralelos, con misiones, objetivos, modelos de financiación y estructuras de gobierno diferentes.

Aun así, Rosenberg divisó un potencial. Cuando se jubiló de Scenic Hudson en 2021, se reunió con Rebecca Gilman Crimmins, nacida en Hudson Valley y profesional de la vivienda asequible en Nueva York, para reunir a un grupo de trabajo de cinco fideicomisos de conservación del suelo y cinco organizaciones de vivienda asequible de la región. Los grupos empezaron a aprender sobre el trabajo de lo demás, para identificar puntos de intersección y trazar un mapa de lugares potenciales en los que podrían asociarse. Combinaron datos sobre clima, biodiversidad y censo con su conocimiento sobre los funcionarios locales, las políticas de planificación y la regulaciones del uso del suelo (RPA 2023). “Las comunidades saludables necesitan tener ambas cosas”: espacios abiertos y viviendas asequibles, dijo Rosenberg. “Estas no deberían verse como mutuamente excluyentes u opuestas”.

A medida que los precios de los bienes raíces se disparan, el clima se desmorona y los Estados Unidos atraviesan una época de reconocimiento del tema racial, grupos de apoyo a la vivienda asequible y la conservación están empezando a explorar cómo pueden trabajar juntos. En 2022, el Instituto Lincoln reunió a profesionales y defensores, incluidos Rosenberg y Crimmins, para debatir sobre el potencial de colaboración entre los fideicomisos de conservación del suelo y los fideicomisos de suelo comunitarios. A través de una serie de debates presenciales y virtuales con el apoyo de la 1772 Foundation, participantes de grupos locales, regionales y nacionales exploraron las barreras que han enfrentado en el camino hacia la asociación, y las oportunidades que tienen por delante.

Preocupaciones compartidas, raíces diferentes

El arquitecto paisajista Charles Eliot, cuyo padre fue presidente de Harvard, fue quien inventó el primer fideicomiso de conservación del suelo de los Estados Unidos, The Trustees of Reservations. Eliot vio cómo las ciudades del país se marchitaban con la contaminación industrial, y previó focos de espacios abiertos de color verde silvestre en todas las ciudades y pueblos. El estado permitió que The Trustees empezara a adquirir y proteger suelo en 1891. En la actualidad, en los Estados Unidos hay 1.281 fideicomisos de suelo que protegieron más de 24 millones de hectáreas. Los fideicomisos de suelo, que en su mayoría operan en entornos rurales y suburbanos, y suelen estar a cargo de voluntarios, protegen los hábitats salvajes, los ecosistemas críticos y los espacios culturales, históricos y naturales, al comprar y gestionar parcelas en su totalidad o al poseer servidumbres de conservación, es decir, acuerdos legalmente voluntarios con los propietarios que limitan el desarrollo y otros usos determinados en una propiedad.

En cambio, el inicio de los fideicomisos de suelo comunitarios (CLT) es más reciente.En 1969, un grupo de activistas de derechos civiles dirigido por Charles Sherrod se propuso generar riqueza y poder colectivo entre los productores rurales negros del suroeste de Georgia. Crearon New Communities, una empresa que combinaba propietarios comunitarios de suelo con propietarios individuales de viviendas, lo que sirvió como modelo para los CLT de hoy en día. La organización se vio forzada a una ejecución hipotecaria de su tierra en 1985, después de que las prácticas discriminatorias del Departamento de Agricultura de los Estados Unidos (USDA, por su sigla en inglés) la privaran de subsidios y ayudas fundamentales tras una sequía devastadora. Pero aún está funcionando como una organización educativa y le dio vida un movimiento: hoy en día existen más de 300 CLT en el país. Los CLT aún tienen como propósito servir a las comunidades marginales, y por lo general, poseen suelo a la vez que les dan a las personas la oportunidad de ser propietarias de viviendas y negocios. A pesar de sus orígenes rurales, ahora, la mayoría de los CLT se centran en brindar viviendas asequibles de forma permanente en entornos urbanos.

Estos orígenes diversos condujeron a una variedad de diferencias, como Katie Michels y David Hindin describen en un documento de trabajo elaborado para la convocatoria del Instituto Lincoln (Michels y Hindin, 2023). La tendencia de los fideicomisos de suelo ha sido centrarse en un electorado más rural, blanco y más adinerado, que, a su vez, está a cargo de su dirección, mientras que los CLT suelen estar destinados a personas de color, que son quienes los dirigen. Los recursos disponibles para los grupos también difieren.

“En comparación con los CLT, los fideicomisos de suelo pueden ser organizaciones más ricas y tener un mayor acceso al poder político y recursos financieros”, escriben Hindin y Michels, y advierten que el financiamiento público y privado se suele destinar a la vivienda o la conservación, pero no a ambas. Debido a que ambos grupos necesitan suelo para cumplir su misión, añaden, “algunos fideicomisos de suelo comunitarios y de conservación del suelo locales han tenido experiencias negativas entre ellos y pueden considerarse como enemigos”.

Pero eso está empezando a cambiar. “Estamos empezando a ver que algunos fideicomisos de conservación del suelo y CLT están realmente intentando resolver cómo trabajar juntos”, dijo Beth Sorce, vicepresidenta del sector de crecimiento de Grounded Solutions Network, una organización nacional sin fines de lucro que promueve soluciones de vivienda asequible y fue producto de una red de CLT. A medida que las ciudades se extienden y las parcelas asequibles empiezan a escasear, las organizaciones de vivienda asequible y conservación están empezando a dejar a atrás sus diferencias, dice Sorce, que participó en la convocatoria del Instituto Lincoln: “Tenemos un objetivo en común de una lugar realmente saludable y habitable. Quizás, en lugar de que todos intentemos adquirir tierras de forma individual, podríamos trabajar juntos para resolver cómo hacerlo de un modo más ecológico para nuestra comunidad”.

Fideicomisos de todo el país “están brindando muchos beneficios a nuestro medioambiente, así como a las vidas y el bienestar de las personas”, comentó Forrest King-Cortes, director de conservación centrada en la comunidad de Land Trust Alliance (LTA), una colación nacional de fideicomisos de conservación del suelo. LTA contrató a King-Cortes, quien también participó en la convocatoria del Instituto Lincoln, para coordinar sus esfuerzos para poner a las personas en el centro del trabajo de conservación. King-Cortes ve “más oportunidades de tener diálogo con otros movimientos como el movimiento de vivienda asequible”.

A medida que estas conversaciones continúan, los participantes están identificando muchas formas posibles de colaboración, desde el intercambio de ideas e información hasta esfuerzos para impulsar una reforma política de forma conjunta. En algunos casos, los grupos están adoptando medidas en el terreno. En Ohio, la Western Reserve Land Conservancy, que trabajó mucho tiempo con bancos de tierras locales para adquirir propiedades inmobiliarias para el espacio público verde, está empezando a asociarse con CLT para una planificación conjunta coordinada por la comunidad que incluirá la vivienda asequible. En Mount Desert Island, Maine, donde hay restricciones de vivienda y los costos llevan al 54 por ciento de los trabajadores a vivir fuera de la isla, Island Housing Trust, un CLT, se está asociando con Maine Coast Heritage Trust en un proyecto de 24 hectáreas que combina la conservación de humedales con el desarrollo de viviendas asequibles para los trabajadores. Y en un suburbio de Seatle con predominio de personas negras y desarrollo acelerado, Homestead Community Land Trust y la organización dirigida por la comunidad Skyway Coalition se están asociando para proteger el espacio verde y la capacidad de pago, mientras evitan el aburguesamiento.

Un modelo colaborativo en Athens, Georgia

Mientras quienes defienden la vivienda asequible y la conservación exploran oportunidades de colaboración, pueden aprender de organizaciones que incorporaron ambos objetivos en su misión. Muchas personas consideran que Athens Land Trust es la estrella guía en la intersección de estos mundos.

A principios de la década de 1990, Nancy Stangle y Skipper StipeMaas estaban desarrollando una comunidad intencional rural, Kenney Ridge, en 53 hectáreas del condado de Athens-Clarke, Georgia, unos 320 kilómetros al norte de Albany, donde nació el movimiento CLT. El plan era que Kenney Ridge incluyera lotes privados para propietarios de viviendas, una casa de hacienda y jardines comunitarios, y espacios abiertos comunes conservados. Pero a medida que desarrollaban la iniciativa, se dieron cuenta de que separar más suelo para conservación también encarecía los lotes privados, porque el costo de construir rutas, tuberías de agua y cloacas se dividía entre los lotes, y a mayor conservación menor era la cantidad de lotes, y por tanto, menos propietarios de lotes había para afrontar los costos. “Veían esta tensión entre el desarrollo de tipo medioambiental y la asequibilidad”, dijo Heather Benham, directora ejecutiva de Athens Land Trust. Además, el aumento del precio estaba excluyendo a algunos de sus amigos.

En esta época, un día Stangle estaba llevando a sus hijos al zoológico en Atlanta cuando su auto se rompió. Una mujer paró y ofreció llevar a Stangle a su oficina, donde podía usar el teléfono. La mujer trabajaba en un fideicomiso de suelo comunitario, Cabbagetown Revitalization and Future Trust.

Después de repasar el modelo del CLT, Stangle y StipeMaas decidieron crear una organización que funcionaría como un fideicomiso de suelo y como un CLT, y así nació Athens Land Trust.

Durante los primeros años, Athens Land Trust funcionó principalmente como un fideicomiso de conservación del suelo. Luego, en 1999, uno de los miembros de la junta compró un baldío en un barrio de Athens con tradición histórica de personas negras y lo donó al grupo. El gobierno local otorgó un subsidio para viviendas asequibles y la organización construyó su primera vivienda.

Las dos alas de la organización siguieron creciendo (el fideicomiso llegó a poseer 8.375 hectáreas de servidumbre de conservación, que provenían de orígenes diversos, desde granjas a las afueras de Athens, hasta plantaciones de pino y montañas en el norte de Georgia, y construyó y reacondicionó viviendas dentro de la ciudad), pero permanecieron prácticamente separadas. “Básicamente, cuando atendíamos el teléfono, era bastante claro si alguien llamaba por una cosa o por otra”, dijo Benham. Quienes llamaban solían ser familias negras de ingresos bajos interesadas en viviendas, o agricultores blancos que deseaban proteger el suelo que habían poseído por generaciones.

A principios de la década de 2000, estas facetas de trabajo paralelas empezaron a intersectarse. Un miembro de la junta mencionó que en uno de los baldíos en el barrio se estaban llevando a cabo actividades con drogas. ¿Podría el fideicomiso de suelo transformarlo en un jardín comunitario? “Cuando estás protegiendo granjas, hacer jardines no parece un salto tan grande”, dijo Benham. “Eso se convirtió en un proyecto, y luego, simplemente siguió creciendo”.

Otros barrios empezaron a comunicarse con nosotros a fin de iniciar proyectos similares. El grupo se asoció con la universidad local para crear una red de jardines comunitarios y una granja urbana donde los vecinos pudieran cultivar alimentos para vender, complementando sus ingresos. El subsidio del USDA brindó financiamiento y la ciudad también ofreció algunas tierras. Para maximizar el beneficio que obtiene la comunidad del suelo, Athens Land Trust empezó a organizar clases de jardinería y jornadas de cultivo, programas para jóvenes relacionados con las habilidades agrícolas y un mercado de productores rurales en un barrio de personas negras con ingresos bajos. Estas actividades apoyan los objetivos de Athens Land Trust de fomentar el desarrollo económico y el empoderamiento de la comunidad, dice Benhma. “La oportunidad económica en torno al mercado de los productores rurales y el desarrollo de pequeños negocios”, comenta, entreteje las parcelas en “el ecosistema y la economía de los barrios”.

Punto de encuentro de la conservación y la justicia

A medida que crecía el trabajo urbano de Athens Land Trust, sus dirigentes también empezaron a aplicar una perspectiva de equidad en su trabajo de conservación rural, e identificaron poblaciones desatendidas por esfuerzos previos de proteger las tierras agrícolas. En abril de 2023, el fideicomiso del suelo estaba cerca de alcanzar un trato para la primera servidumbre de conservación en una granja en posesión de personas negras en Georgia. A lo largo de los Estados Unidos, un 97 por ciento de granjas y un 94 por ciento de hectáreas de granjas pertenecen a productores rurales blancos. Muchos propietarios de tierras negros carecen de un derecho claro (un legado de reglas injustas de herencia de bienes inmuebles) y no pueden donar o vender las servidumbres de sus tierras. Por otro lado, es entendible que quienes ganaron la lucha para obtener un derecho claro duden a la hora de transferirlo. Benham añade que los mecanismos de puntuación utilizados por el Servicio de Conservación de Recursos Naturales del USDA para determinar si una parcela debe conservarse tienden a favorecer a las granjas ubicadas en suelos agrícolas de primera calidad. “¡Vaya sorpresa!: la mayoría de los productores rurales negros no obtuvieron las tierras de mejor calidad”, señala.

Benham cree que Athens Land Trust logró tender un puente entre ambos mundos porque su objetivo fundamental es darle a la comunidad el control de las tierras y el desarrollo. Dejando de lado la visión estricta hacia la vivienda o la conservación, el fideicomiso y otras organizaciones afines “pueden tener más marcos, vocabulario, prácticas y formas de interactuar en común” con el movimiento de justicia medioambiental que con los fideicomisos de conservación del suelo, explica. Esto también se refleja en la filantropía: los financiadores que parecen entender cómo se alinean el trabajo de vivienda y de conservación de los fideicomisos son quienes reconocen su “trabajo de sostenibilidad”, similar a la justicia social, “en barrios de bajos ingresos”.

En el sur del Bronx, Nueva York, un fideicomiso de suelo comunitario creado en 2020, funciona con un modelo híbrido similar, y trabaja para preservar la capacidad de pago de la vivienda y proteger el espacio abierto, lo que incluye la red de jardines comunitarios del barrio. South Bronx Community Land and Resource Trust surgió del trabajo de Nos Quedamos, una sociedad de desarrollo comunitario local que comenzó en la década de 1990 como resistencia de base a un plan de renovación urbana que habría desplazado a una comunidad de ingresos bajos, en su mayoría latina. Comprometidos con el “desarrollo sin desplazamiento”, desarrollo impulsado y controlado por la comunidad, Nos Quedamos ahora tiene una cartera de viviendas asequibles. Lanzó el CLT para “crear y fomentar una comunidad más saludable al equilibrar el uso del suelo, la capacidad de pago, la accesibilidad a los servicios y espacios abiertos, la sostenibilidad y la resiliencia medioambiental, la escala y el carácter comunitario”. Tiene como objetivo ser una entidad centralizada que sea propiedad de la comunidad.

Julia Duranti-Martínez, que trabaja convarios CLT en la organización para el desarrollo comunitario nacional LISC y es miembro de la junta directiva de East Harlem/El Barrio CLT en la ciudad de Nueva York, recomienda que las conversaciones sobre colaboración “den prioridad a los grupos que surgen de la organización de justicia medioambiental”. En un mercado de bienes raíces donde el suelo es costoso y escaso, los grupos de conservación y vivienda compiten por parcelas, y los parques nuevos suelen verse como presagios de aburguesamiento, los proyectos de desarrollo comunitario que han navegado estas tensiones con mayor éxito se han visto impulsados por el mismo objetivo fundamental que el movimiento de justicia medioambiental, explica Julia, y asegura que las “comunidades de color, indígenas y negras son las que realmente están en condiciones de tomar decisiones”.

Duranti-Martínez agrega que, históricamente, el marco de los CLT ha tenido más en común con los grupos de justicia medioambiental que con el movimiento ecologista. “La promoción de estos modelos de administración comunitarios no se opone a la vivienda asequible”, comentó, simplemente porque “una comunidad saludable” tiene “todos los tipos de espacios: vivienda asequible y digna, espacio comercial asequible, espacio verde y espacios culturales y comunitarios”.

Hacia adelante

A pesar de las ideas prometedoras de colaboración y entusiasmo para estas iniciativas, sigue habiendo obstáculos culturales e ideológicos. Históricamente, para los fideicomisos de suelo, el éxito se ha medido por el número de hectáreas protegidas y los dólares recaudados, pero estas mediciones convencionales “no capturan realmente todo el impacto” de los proyectos más complejos y pequeños, dijo Michels. Proteger el especio verde y construir viviendas en dos hectáreas podría llevar la misma cantidad de tiempo, esfuerzo y recursos que conservar 4.000 hectáreas rurales, señala, lo que significa que existen algunos marcos ideológicos en relación con la conservación que deben cambiar.

Los colaboradores potenciales también deben avanzar con determinación y esmero. Según muchas parte involucradas en este trabajo, la participación significativa e inclusiva de la comunidad será clave para lograr combinar con éxito objetivos de espacio abierto y vivienda asequible, ya sea que ese esfuerzo esté ocurriendo dentro de una sola organización o como parte de una colaboración entre grupos. “La conservación tiene mucho que aprender sobre cómo incorporar a las partes interesadas de la comunidad como tomadores de decisiones dentro de nuestras organizaciones”, dice King-Cortes de LTA. A pesar del interés cada vez mayor de ampliar el trabajo del movimiento, “muchos de nosotros no estemos listos, diría, para formar parte de asociaciones con grupos para la vivienda asequible hasta que no hayamos hecho nuestro trabajo: hasta que hayamos aprendido sobre las raíces del movimiento de vivienda asequible, los lazos con el movimiento de derechos civiles”.

Sin embargo, los grupos de conservación también tienen un caudal de recursos y experiencia para ofrecer. Para los CLT, “sin lugar a duda, el mayor obstáculo para poder expandirse es el acceso al suelo y al dinero”, dijo Sorce de Grounded Solutions Network. Las asociaciones suelen ser útiles para cerrar la brecha, y los grupos de conservación también podrían ayudar en este sentido. “Podrían agruparse para adquirir una parcela más grande, parte de la cual se destinará a conservación, y parte a vivienda”.

De hecho, este tipo de sociedad podría beneficiar a ambos sectores. “Todos están luchando para recaudar fondos”, dijo King-Cortes. “Todos están intentando sacarle el mayor provecho a lo que tenemos. Pero, si trabajamos juntos en la planificación, creo que ambos movimientos pueden lograr más o aprovechar al máximo los recursos”.

Tener éxito en eso demandará esfuerzo, porque la mayor parte de la financiación para la conservación y la vivienda se ha separado históricamente, como apuntan Michels y Hindin. “Todos los programas y financiamientos apoyados por políticas públicas están estancados”, confirmó Rosenberg. Un grupo para la vivienda que quiere ejecutar una iniciativa de desarrollo con caminos, parques o jardines comunitarios, por lo general, puede conseguir financiación para construir las viviendas, mientras, por otro lado, los grupos de conservación solo pueden conseguir financiamiento para conservar suelo.

Sin embargo, existen excepciones a la regla. En Vermont, en 1987, los grupos de conservación y vivienda se organizaron para crear una fuente única de financiamiento público, el Vermont Housin and Conservation Trust Fund, administrado por la Junta de Conservación y Vivienda de Vermont (Vermont Housing and Conservation Board, VHCB). Michels, que trabajó en VHCB por muchos años, dice que representa un modelo potencial de colaboración. Se cultivaron relaciones y se logró un entendimiento entre las dos comunidades, y tanto los profesionales como los gestores de políticas llegaron a ver que los objetivos dobles se complementan, no compiten, lo que refuerza una tradición de uso del suelo de casi 100 años de antigüedad de asentamiento compacto rodeado por un paisaje de trabajo.

Todos los años, una coalición de grupos de conservación y vivienda asequible ejercen presión en la legislatura del estado para obtener financiamiento del VHCB. El resultado es “muchas relaciones forjadas entre dichas comunidades de práctica, y cada una sabe en qué trabaja la otra”, dijo Michels. VHCB invirtió en proyectos con ambos elementos en muchos pueblos, y garantizó la disponibilidad de viviendas asequibles y espacios abiertos. “Existe una versión de colaboración que no implica trabajar en conjunto en una misma parcela”, pero se puja por el mismo resultado, dice Michels; cuando una oportunidad se presenta en una parcela, se aprovecha al máximo.

De regreso en Hudson Valley, el grupo de trabajo de Rosenberg está tomando como modelo la Ley de Preservación Comunitaria (Community Preservation Act) de Massachusetts. Los votantes en Massachusetts pueden elegir que su municipalidad aplique un recargo a los impuestos prediales, lo que, luego, puede usarse para financiar la conservación, vivienda asequible, recreación en espacios abiertos y preservación histórica. La legislatura de Nueva York autorizó que algunas municipalidades voten por una tarifa local de transferencia de bienes raíces para crear un fondo de preservación comunitario, pero la recaudación solo puede apoyar la conservación, no la vivienda.

Identificar las reformas políticas que podrían ayudar a realizar su trabajo y acordar en una declaración de propósitos compartidos han sido prioridades para el grupo de Hudson Valley, que continuó sus exploraciones con apoyo de la Regional Plan Association, el patrocinador fiscal del proyecto, y el Consensus Building Institute. “En realidad, existen algunas colaboraciones que ya están comenzando”, dijo Rosenberg. Kingston Land Trust, que estudia y fomenta el modelo de fideicomiso de suelo comunitario desde 2017, se asoció con el grupo para la vivienda asequible regional, RUPCO, para lanzar una CLT como parte de su iniciativa Land for Homes (Suelo para Viviendas). Además, la organización trabajó con estudiantes graduados en la Universidad de Columbia y Bard College para desarrollar una visión de vivienda regional, y una guía para la colaboración entre grupos de conservación y vivienda (Kingston Land Trust 2021). Mientras tanto, The Chatham, una empresa de conservación del suelo de Columbia, con sede en Nueva York, cumple la función de patrocinador fiscal de otro CLT nuevo.

Y, dentro del grupo de trabajo, uno de los fideicomisos de conservación del suelo identificó una parcela agrícola de 46 hectáreas para la venta en el pueblo de Red Hook que “define la entrada a la comunidad”, dijo Rosenberg. Red Hook, tiene un fideicomiso de preservación comunitario que apoya la conservación, y Scenic Hudson y otros grupos están activos allí desde hace mucho tiempo.  Pero, tras expandir, hace poco, su sistema cloacal público, Red Hook también estuvo considerando desarrollar más viviendas asequibles, y, en el caso de estos bienes inmobiliarios, repeler a los compradores privados interesados en desarrollar la parcela completa.

Las condiciones parecían favorables. Así que dos de las organizaciones de vivienda del grupo de trabajo y dos de los fideicomisos de suelo se reunieron con funcionarios locales para debatir sobre la colaboración con el pueblo en torno a un proyecto que alcanzaría ambos objetivos: conservar las tierras agrícolas y construir algunas viviendas asequibles. Ahora, el pueblo planea comprar la tierra, trabajar con uno de los fideicomisos de suelo para implementar una servidumbre de conservación en la mayor parte de esta y separar el resto para viviendas que uno de los grupos para la vivienda asequible construirá. “Ese proyecto aún no se implementó, pero está avanzando”, dijo Rosenberg. “Es muy emocionante”.

COLOQUIO DEL INSTITUTO LINCOLN SOBRE FIDEICOMISOS DE SUELO COMUNITARIOS Y DE CONSERVACIÓN DEL SUELO

Durante 2022, el Instituto Lincoln de Políticas de Suelo coordinó un trabajo de investigación de un año sobre el potencial de colaboración entre los fideicomisos de conservación de suelo y fideicomisos de suelo comunitarios. Con el apoyo de Peter Stein de Lyme Timber Company y un subsidio de 1772 Foundation, el instituto reunió a un grupo de expertos en conservación y vivienda asequible para realizar una serie de reuniones, lo que culminó con un coloquio y un documento de trabajo (Michels y Hindin, 2023).

El coloquio ha servido como fuente de información para iniciativas en curso para fomentar prioridades en materia de conservación y vivienda asequible. En febrero, en la cumbre del Con-necticut Land Conservation Council (Consejo de Conservación del Suelo de Connecticut), los coautores del documento de trabajo, Katie Michels y David Hindin, aconsejaron a los defensores y líderes de los sectores de conservación y vivienda que consideren agendas compartidas y objetivos de políticas futuras. En marzo, Jim Levitt, director de Recursos de Suelo y Agua Administrados de Forma Sustentable del Instituto Lincoln, moderó un panel principal titulado “Affordable Housing and Land Conservation: Not an Either/Or” (Vivienda asequible y conservación del suelo: no es una o la otra) en la reunión anual de la Massachusetts Land Trust Coalition; el panel incluyó un participante del coloquio.

“Para prosperar, las comunidades necesitan viviendas asequibles permanentemente y suelo conservado permanentemente que brinde espacios verdes, infraestructura verde y hábitats respetuosos de la biodiversidad”, dice Chandni Navalkha, directora asociada de Recursos de Suelo y Agua Administrados de Forma Sustentable del Instituto Lincoln. “Al trabajar de forma más colaborativa, estas comunidades de práctica tienen un potencial único para aprovechar sus décadas de éxito y experiencia para implementar proyectos con múltiples beneficios y objetivos que enfrentan los desafíos más urgentes de las comunidades”.

Audrea Lim es escritora en la ciudad de Nueva York y su trabajo ha aparecido en el New York Times, Harper’s y Guardian. Su libro Free the Land (Liberar el suelo), sobre la mercantilización del suelo y alternativas en los Estados Unidos, será publicado por la editorial St. Martin’s Press en 2024.

Imagen principal: Estudiantes de posgrado de la Universidad de Columbia trabajaron con Kingston Land Trust en un proyecto que prevé nuevos modelos de vivienda asequible en inmuebles de propiedad comunal, incluidos departamentos de densidad media. Crédito: “(E)CO-Living: Towards a More Affordable and Green Kingston” ([E]COVida: hacia un Kingston más ecológico y asequible) de Yiyang Cai, Kai Guo, Lingbei Chen, Wenyi Peng. Urban Design Studio II, primavera de 2021, Facultad de Arquitectura, Planificación y Preservación, Universidad de Columbia. Profesores: Kaja Kühl (coordinadora), con Lee Altman, Anna Dietzsch, Shachi Pandey, Thaddeus Pawlowski y asociados, Zarith Pineda, Victoria Vuono. Socio local: Kingston Land Trust.

Referencias

Kingston Land Trust. 2021. “An Affordable Eco-Dwelling Roadmap: A Guide for Land Trusts and Housing Organizations to Collaborate on Inclusive, Holistic, and Sustainable Affordable Housing Developments”. Kingston, Nueva York: Kingston Land Trust and Bard College MBA in Sustainability. https://kingstonlandtrust.org/sites/KingstonLandTrust.org/files/inline-files/Affordable%20Eco-Dwelling%20Roadmap%20KLT%20v.5.28.21_0.pdf.

Michels, Katie y David A. Hindin. 2023. “Building Collaboration Among Community Land Trusts Providing Affordable Housing and Conservation Land Trusts Protecting Land for Ecological Value”. Documento de trabajo. Cambridge, MA: Instituto Lincoln de Políticas de Suelo. (Enero). https://www.lincolninst.edu/publications/working-papers/building-collaboration-among-community-land-trusts-providing-affordable.

RPA (Regional Plan Association). 2023. Hudson Valley Affordable Housing and Conservation Strategy. https://rpa.org/hudson-valley-affordable-housing-conservation-strategy.

Climate change is no longer knocking—it kicked down the door this summer. Wildfires destroyed more than 33 million acres of forest in Canada’s worst-ever fire season. Vermont was flooded by a 100-year storm for the second time in 12 years, while a different deluge left five dead outside of Philadelphia. Temperatures in Phoenix crested 110ºF for 31 consecutive days, failing to dip below 90ºF at any time for more than two straight weeks. And as deadly bouts of flood, fire, and ferocious heat erupted all over the planet, we lived through the hottest day in recorded history—a global record that was promptly broken the very next day, and again the next—in what scientists say was likely the hottest month on Earth in 120,000 years.    

Given the urgency of the climate crisis, every workable solution to limit further warming and to transition our economies off of fossil fuels deserves exploration. This dire situation demands technological advances, of course; indeed, technology has alleviated so much human suffering, it’s tempting to heave all our hopes squarely upon its back, like desperate sports fans expectantly looking to their team’s star player to pull off just one more spectacular play as the clock runs out.  

But we can’t overlook the importance of allowing and encouraging nature to heal its own ecosystems as part of our climate strategy. And nature’s toolbox can be surprisingly effective. 

Trees are often touted for the many small miracles they provide, especially in urban areas, as they cool streets, clean air, and reduce storm runoff while pulling carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. But how many people know that microscopic forest fungi process twice as much carbon as the United States emits each year? Or that a salt marsh can sequester 10 times as much carbon per acre as a forest? Or that restoring even a small fraction of bison populations across parts of the American prairie could help those grasslands absorb more carbon than all of Great Britain emits in a year?  

These are not miracle cures for the climate crisis, of course; none of these tools will slow climate change on its own without a dramatic reduction of fossil fuel use. But all are surprisingly powerful, relatively simple, and low-risk strategies we could be using more often, in more places. After all, both an expensive cordless drill and a five-dollar screwdriver can help you build something—but only if you get to work using them.  

Marsh Magic 

Hundreds of millions of people around the world live near a salt marsh, or a similar coastal ecosystem of mangroves or seagrass. These seaside sanctuaries offer quiet beauty and attract abundant wildlife; they also absorb flood water and wave energy during storms, reducing damage to adjacent communities by up to 20 percent. But many people don’t realize that these unassuming tidal wetlands are also busy trapping carbon at an astonishing rate—10 to 40 times faster than a forest.   

There are two reasons salt marshes, mangroves, and seagrass beds are such powerful carbon sinks. One is that their vegetation grows very quickly, says Hilary Stevens, coastal resilience manager at Restore America’s Estuaries. “There’s a lot of photosynthesis, a lot of pulling of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere,” she explains. 

But the real magic of the marsh is its salty, soggy soil. When that vegetation dies, it falls to the bottom of the marsh and gets buried in a network of roots and sediment, where it will remain indefinitely saturated with briny water. That anaerobic environment slows or even stops the decomposition process, allowing the carbon in the plants to stay stashed in the soil for hundreds or even thousands of years. This underwater vault is known as “blue carbon.” 

While forests are also excellent at trapping carbon, Stevens says, they’re more likely to release it, through events ranging from wildfire to decomposition. But the carbon in marsh soil “can remain there for centuries if that area remains inundated and undisturbed.”  

Of course, that’s a big “if” when there are humans around. The United States alone loses an estimated 80,000 acres of coastal wetlands each year due to a combination of development and sea level rise. Even many surviving marshes have been ditched and drained over the years, allowing air to reach the long-submerged soil, and turning powerful carbon sinks into leaky CO2 emitters.   

“If you disturb an inundated soil, if you allow it to drain—whether that’s because you filled it, ditched it, diked it, drained it, converted it to agriculture, or paved it and put up a parking lot—all of that organic material is at risk of being rereleased into the atmosphere,” Stevens says. Centuries worth of carbon can then escape fairly quickly, so preventing further loss of healthy coastal wetlands is critical from a climate standpoint.  

That’s a growing challenge as ocean levels rise more quickly. Salt marshes can sometimes migrate upland as rising seas encroach, says Cynthia Dittbrenner, director of coastal and natural resources at Massachusetts-based conservation organization The Trustees—but only if there’s room to do so, and the walls and roads of human development often make that impossible. And although they’re actually quite good at adapting to slowly rising seas—because a healthy salt marsh naturally builds in elevation each year as its grasses die off and accumulate on the bottom and daily tidal inflows deliver new sediment—scientists fear that natural process of accretion can’t keep up with the unnatural and accelerating rate of sea level rise driven by human-caused climate change. 

What’s more, a lot of our remaining marshes aren’t particularly healthy.  

In New England, for example, colonial farmers viewed salt marshes as a source of hay for livestock and horses, and set about draining them to ease harvesting. To this day, most of the region’s marshes are still ribboned with man-made ditches dug hundreds of years ago. Later, the long-neglected ditches clogged, creating pools of standing water that prompted 20th-century mosquito-prevention squads to dig them out once again. But a drained marsh doesn’t build elevation as it should; in fact, it sinks, because the organic matter in the soil starts decomposing more rapidly as it interacts with the air.  

“A legacy of 300 years of us ditching the marsh has led to lowering the water table, and that marsh soil is now being exposed to oxygen,” Dittbrenner says. “It’s aerated, it’s decomposing quickly, and it’s actually sinking . . . so we have to heal the hydrology to fix that natural process.”  

There are simple and cost-effective ways to restore ditch-drained salt marshes. One method, piloted by the US Fish and Wildlife Service, is to cut marsh grass along the edge of a ditch, rake the hay into the trench, and secure it to the bottom with twine and stakes. “When the tides come in, that hay slows the water down and encourages sediment to drop out,” Dittbrenner says, and that slowly refills the ditch. “If you do that over a series of three to four years, you’ve filled the ditch up, and now it can grow salt marsh hay,” and tidewater lingers longer as it naturally would.  

The Trustees implemented that technique on 85 acres in the Great Marsh north of Boston, and the results were so promising that the organization secured funding—and hard-won permits—to expand the restoration effort across all of the 1,400 acres it manages there.  

Another opportunity for marsh restoration is in places where a road or bridge has cut off part of a marsh from incoming seawater. “The area upstream of that essentially becomes freshwater, because it’s not getting enough tidal influence,” Stevens says. Soil inundated with freshwater is still slow to release carbon dioxide, she notes, but it does emit a lot of methane—a much more potent greenhouse gas—because it hosts a different set of microbes not found in brackish or saltwater. “If you can restore tidal flow to those areas, there’s a massive carbon benefit to that.”   

One such effort underway is the Herring River Restoration Project in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, where a dike built in 1909 cut off tidal flow to what had been a stable estuary for 2,000 years. A new bridge with large tide gates will allow ocean water to return—gradually, at first—along with herring and other fish, tidal sediment, and native saltwater seagrasses. The project will return 677 acres of freshwater wetland to salt marsh, which the US Geological Survey calculates will reduce emissions by an equivalent of nearly 3,000 tons of carbon per year.  

With less room to migrate, smaller, narrow “fringe” marshes are more at risk from rising seas. But they can “attenuate quite a bit of wave energy,” Dittbrenner says, making them useful storm defenses for coastal communities, and they can be protected—or even created—with simple, natural methods. Installing coir logs (made of coconut husk fiber) or mesh bags stuffed with oyster shells a few meters offshore, for example, can help protect and grow the marsh behind it. “It slows the wave energy so much that it allows sediment to build up,” she says, until grass can grow on it. In one project, Dittbrenner says, researchers were able to extend a stretch of fringe marsh 10 feet further into the water in less than a year using old lobster traps to slow the waves and capture sediment.  

Stevens is now working on a project in the Gulf Coast that uses recycled oyster shells from restaurants to build artificial reefs, creating new habitat for live oysters. In addition to increasing food security for the community (oysters, she notes, are one of the most climate-friendly ways to grow protein, requiring no irrigation, fertilizer, or feed), the reefs create a breakwater to stabilize the shoreline and protect adjacent communities.  

But halting the continued loss of coastal wetlands would have the biggest climate impact of all. “We would love to see better protection for existing blue carbon ecosystems,” Stevens says, along with a more coordinated government approach—two pillars of Restore America’s Estuaries’ Blue Carbon National Action Plan.  

At the same time, Stevens says, there’s a need for permitting reform, so groups like RAE and The Trustees can more easily restore degraded marshes; it can be difficult to reuse dredged sediment, for example, even though it’s a key ingredient to help sinking marshes. “Some of those regulations, because of the way they’re worded, actually inhibit restoration, because they make it so difficult to operate in the coastal zone,” she says. Such rules were put in place with the best of intentions, she adds, but that was decades ago. “And we’ve learned a lot since then.”  

Forest-Feeding Fungi 

Neither plant nor animal (though more closely related to the latter), fungi are their own biological kingdom, comprising about 3.5 million different species. Microscopic fungi are everywhere—all over our bodies, on plants, in the air we breathe—and without them, says Jennifer Bhatnagar, associate professor of biology at Boston University, most of the biological processes on earth would cease. They’re especially important in forests.  

“One of the main roles of those fungi in forests is to decompose dead plant leaves, roots, and other plant parts, and other dead microorganisms, and most of that activity happens in the soil,” she says. In doing so, they release elements like nitrogen, phosphorus, and sulfur back into the soil in a form that plants can use.  

But there’s a group that’s particularly crucial to forest health: mycorrhizal fungi, which live on the roots of plants in one of the oldest symbiotic relationships found in nature.  

When a mycorrhizal fungus colonizes a plant by growing on or inside of its root cells, the plant will send up to 30 percent of its carbon—in the form of sugar, produced through photosynthesis—from its leaves down to its roots to feed the fungus. To return the favor, “the fungus will use that carbon to extend out into the soil and absorb those nutrients that are being decomposed by other fungi,” Bhatnagar says, and give them to the plant. The carbon ends up feeding not just the fungus, but also nearby microbes, which help sequester it in the soil.  

“This is the main way that plant carbon gets from above ground to below ground on the surface of the earth,” Bhatnagar says. “It’s a really important way that we’re able to take carbon out of the atmosphere and put it into the earth—and it can remain there for quite a long time.”  

A study published in June estimated that an astounding 13.12 gigatons of carbon fixed by plants each year is allocated to mycorrhizal fungi, at least temporarily. It’s not yet known how much of that carbon is retained in the soil long-term, but even half of that would represent more than the annual carbon-equivalent emissions of the United States—and the researchers suggested that fungi could be essential to reaching net zero.   

Mycorrhizal fungi networks can help boost a forest’s carbon intake above ground as well. Ecologist Colin Averill, lead scientist at ​​ETH Zurich’s Crowther Lab and the founder of the carbon removal start-up Funga, says it’s helpful to think about the microbial environment of soil the way we conceive of the human gut biome. “Each of us has this incredibly biodiverse community of bacteria in our gut, and this has profound implications for our health,” Averill says—and a forest is no different.  

To learn what a healthy forest microbiome looks like, he and his team compared soil samples from hundreds of locations across Europe where foresters had been tracking trees for decades. They found that the mix of fungi living on the tree roots in the sampled forests was linked to a threefold variation in how fast the trees grew. Put another way, Averill says, “You could have two pine forests in Central Europe sitting side by side, experiencing the same climate, growing in the same soils. But if one of them has the right community of fungi on its roots, it can be growing up to three times as fast as that adjacent forest,” and removing more carbon from the atmosphere. 

This can have a particularly profound impact on the reforestation of former agricultural land or other degraded landscapes, where, after decades of farming, grazing, or mining, Averill says, “The microbes that live in that soil no longer look anything like the microbes in a forest.”  

Averill partnered with a nonprofit in Wales that was reforesting an abandoned sheep pasture to conduct an experiment, adding a handful of soil from a healthy forest to some of the saplings as they were planted. “It’s a very low-tech procedure,” he says. “But it’s not just any dirt. It’s dirt from a forest that our analyses identified as harboring intact wild, biodiverse, high-performing fungal communities. And the early results there show we can accelerate forest regeneration by 30 to 70 percent if we co-reintroduce the below-ground microbiology.”   

Similar experiments around the world that introduced healthy microbial networks to degraded forest or grassland soil have shown a 64 percent average increase in biomass growth, Averill says—though the results vary widely. “Some places are unresponsive, some are incredibly responsive,” he says. “But basically what we’re learning is that there’s something special about wild microbiology that can be lost, and it can have this enormous effect if you reintroduce it.”  

Letting Wildlife Go Wild 

For another way to accelerate forest growth and carbon uptake, we turn to a different biological kingdom: animalia.

A 2023 study led by Yale ecology professor Oswald J. Schmitz found that protecting and restoring populations of animal species can supercharge the carbon capture capabilities of their respective ecosystems. This can enhance the total amount of CO2 naturally absorbed and stored by as much as 6.41 gigatons per year worldwide—or more than 14 trillion pounds of CO2. 

“People assume that because animals are rare in ecosystems, they don’t matter to ecosystem functioning,” Schmitz says. But the idea of “trophic cascades”—in which predators, by preying on herbivores, have a ripple effect on vegetation—made him think otherwise. “If predators can have a profound effect on plants, and we know herbivores can have a profound effect on plants, then surely they should also have an effect on carbon cycling and nutrient cycling.”  

They do, and the carbon impact of healthy wildlife populations can be tremendous in all kinds of ecosystems. 

Endangered forest elephants in central Africa, for example, spread the seeds of trees and woody plants, and trample and devour vegetative undergrowth, helping carbon-dense overstory trees grow faster and bigger. Restoring wild elephant populations within the region’s 79 national parks and protected areas—about 537,000 square kilometers of tropical rainforest—could help capture an estimated 13 megatons of additional CO2 per year, or 13 million metric tons.  

In the ocean, migrating marine fish eat algae near the surface, and their fecal matter drops to the ocean floor or nourishes photosynthesizing phytoplankton. Fish also help the ocean lock up carbon as they rid their bodies of excess salt through the production of calcite, a form of calcium carbonate. “Calcite is a way of binding up salt,” Schmitz says, “but it’s also a carbon-based unit.” The hard pellets sink to the ocean bottom, and don’t break down easily. Marine fish currently help the oceans absorb 5.5 gigatons of CO2 annually—without getting explicit credit for it—and Schmitz says overharvesting fish or catching them in deeper waters could jeopardize that enormous underwater carbon vault.  

Predators like sea otters, meanwhile, help carbon-absorbent kelp forests thrive by keeping seaweed-munching sea urchins in check. Gray wolves and sharks create similar trophic cascades in boreal forests and coral reefs, where they keep the populations of their smaller herbaceous prey in balance.

In the arctic, organic matter in the ground doesn’t decay and release methane as long as the permafrost stays frozen. Caribou and muskoxen help ensure that by trampling arctic snowpack, creating a cold crust of compressed snow that forms an insulative barrier over the permafrost. Meanwhile, just by eating and trampling shrubs, they help the snow reflect more solar radiation. “If the animals aren’t there, the shrubs grow above the snowpack level, the sun shines on the vegetation and, especially in the spring, that vegetation holds the solar radiation,” Schmitz says. “It doesn’t reflect it the way snow would, and it warms up the soil a lot faster.”  

And in North America, where white settlers all but wiped out the more than 30 million bison that once roamed the prairies, just 2 percent of that animal’s one-time numbers remain, confined to about 1 percent of its historical range. Because heavy herds of grazing bison help grasslands retain carbon in the soil, restoring their numbers across even a small fraction of the landscape—less than 16 percent of a handful of prairies where human conflict would be minimal—could help those ecosystems store an additional 595 megatons of CO2 annually, the study found.  

That’s more than 10 percent of all the CO2 emitted by the United States in 2021. “We could restore up to 2 million bison in parts of the prairie states where they’re going to have very little conflict with people, and in doing that, you will be able to take up enough carbon to offset all of the prairie states’ fossil fuel emissions,” Schmitz explains.  

These findings could have a meaningful impact on land and marine conservation efforts, says Jim Levitt, director of the International Land Conservation Network (ILCN) at the Lincoln Institute. “This is not your everyday piece of natural climate solution research,” says Levitt, who was not involved in the study. “I think this is a major insight.”  

For one thing, it points to the need for larger, more interconnected wild spaces. “It’s not just land protection, it’s also stewardship across big corridors, large landscape conservation,” Levitt says. Animals need huge swaths of functionally intact ecosystems to recover their historical numbers and species diversity, but they can rebound rapidly given the right conditions.  

“If you give nature a chance to reestablish itself, it’s really efficient at doing so,” Levitt says, noting that many US National Forests were once abandoned lands denuded of their timber. Now those swaths of forest are essential tools for absorbing atmospheric carbon.  

“Not only do the trees sequester carbon, but the soil, the animals, the insect life, and the mycorrhizal networks under the ground, they’re all sequestering carbon, and they all depend on a healthy chain of trophic networks,” Levitt says. “So there is utility, even related to the survival of our species, in having wild animals on open space. It’s not just beautiful, it keeps the carbon cycle in tune.” 

As a resource hub connecting private and civic conservation groups across cultural and political boundaries, Levitt says ILCN has an important role to play in supporting the establishment of the type of linked, protected environments that promote greater biodiversity. “You really need large, interconnected, protected spaces to get to truly rich ecosystems,” he says. “And what networks can do is make land conservation contagious sociologically—meaning, if your next-door neighbor has conserved his property, you’re more likely to do the same thing.” ILCN also supports the global 30×30 effort, an agreement among more than 190 countries to work toward protecting 30 percent of the world’s land and oceans by 2030. 

With that ambitious global conservation goal in mind, Schmitz contends that the recent study demands a shift in perspective, and an embrace of more dynamic landscapes. “We can’t just do it in parks and protected areas, there just isn’t enough [protected space],” Schmitz says. “So we actually have to think about working landscapes.”  

And that’s where human-wildlife conflict can occur, as wild animals trample crops, for example. To ease that tension, Schmitz suggests paying landowners for lost livelihoods as well as for the carbon they’re offsetting. “If we’re going to ask people to live with these animals, we should at least compensate them . . . but also we should inspire them to think differently about being stewards of their lands,” he adds. “Instead of having cattle ranchers in the western prairies, maybe there are some people who’d think of themselves better as carbon ranchers, who are willing to bring bison back, and we should actually pay them for the service that provides.” 

Jon Gorey is a staff writer for the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. 

Lead image: Coastal salt marsh in Virginia. Credit: McKinneMike via iStock/Getty Images Plus.

Laura Johnson, a lifelong conservationist with more than 35 years of experience in nonprofit management, has been named the 2023–2024 Kingsbury Browne Fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, and winner of the Kingsbury Browne Conservation Leadership Award from the Land Trust Alliance.  

The Kingsbury Browne award and fellowship—named in honor of the Boston tax lawyer and former Lincoln Institute fellow who inspired the Land Trust Alliance’s founding in 1982—have been bestowed annually since 2006 to honor people who have enriched the land conservation community with their outstanding leadership, innovation, and creativity.  

Johnson’s impact on the conservation world spans decades and continents. She served as the president of Mass Audubon for 14 years, leading the country’s largest independent state Audubon organization until 2012. Prior to that, she spent 16 years at The Nature Conservancy working as a lawyer, Massachusetts state director, and vice president of the northeast region. She is also a past chair of the Land Trust Alliance board of directors. And the fellowship will be a homecoming of sorts for Johnson, who cofounded the Lincoln Institute’s International Land Conservation Network (ILCN) in 2014 along with current ILCN Director Jim Levitt and 2012–2013 Kingsbury Browne Fellow Peter Stein.  

After Johnson studied how conservation easements and other conservation tools that had been developed in the United States were being adapted abroad, she and her colleagues realized that a growing global movement of private conservationists were eager to learn from one another. They founded the ILCN with a mission to connect organizations and people around the world that are accelerating voluntary private and civic land conservation.  

“Laura Johnson has been an invaluable contributor to the land trust movement in the United States and across the globe,” Levitt says. “Her energy, her personal dedication to the cause, and her remarkable diplomatic skills have been key to the recent evolution of the practice of private and civic sector land conservation from Canada to Chile and China. We very much look forward to the insights she will share as the 2023–2024 Kingsbury Browne Fellow at the Lincoln Institute.”  

Johnson received the award and fellowship at Rally 2023: The National Land Conservation Conference, a Land Trust Alliance event. “I have been so privileged to work with great people from all over the world, and certainly here in the US,” Johnson says. “And while every organization and geographic area has unique issues and challenges, there are also remarkable similarities—and we share a tremendous sense of urgency in the face of climate change. We all know we need to do more, better, faster.” 

As a fellow with the Lincoln Institute in 1980, tax attorney Kingsbury Browne studied the needs and opportunities of private land trusts in the United States; he discovered there was no national effort to track or share the best land conservation ideas and practices. So with support from the Lincoln Institute, Browne and several others started the Land Trust Exchange, which grew over the years and eventually became the Land Trust Alliance—a national land conservation organization that works to save the places people need and love by strengthening land conservation across America. The Alliance now represents approximately 950 member land trusts protecting over 61 million acres.  

Kingsbury Browne fellows continue in that tradition by engaging in research, writing, and mentoring, and facilitating a project that builds upon and shares their experience with the broader land conservation community. 

Jon Gorey is a staff writer at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. 

Lead image: Laura Johnson. Credit: DJ Glisson II / Firefly Imageworks.