Rick Schultz doesn’t hate grass outright. He can see the use for it in some places—kids should be able to play soccer somewhere, sure—but there’s no need for it in road medians or sweeping lawns in arid places, says Schultz, a water conservation specialist at the municipally owned utility in Castle Rock, Colorado.

Located on the southern fringes of the Denver metro area, Castle Rock is one of the fastest growing communities in the country. Its population has skyrocketed from 20,224 in 2000 to nearly 72,000 today. Seventy percent of Castle Rock’s water supply comes from non-renewable groundwater, so as the town grew, officials had to figure out how to stretch that supply. In 2006, the water utility and the planning department started collaborating to address that issue. 

The community created a water master plan that set guidelines—like where it made sense to have grass—to delineate how and where they could conserve water while still accommodating growth. Schultz says they had to think outside of traditional land use regulations and water supply patterns to work toward long-term sustainability, steering disparate parts of the planning process toward smart growth: “We needed to push the boundaries a little if we wanted a better outcome.”

Since then, Castle Rock has introduced financial incentives, regulatory changes, and even behavioral science strategies to ensure that water supply is actively considered as part of every planning and development process. From offering incentives to developers who install water monitoring systems to requiring landscapers to pursue professional certification in water efficiency, Castle Rock has become a leader in this area, recognized by the state of Colorado for its efforts and for sharing best practices with other organizations. 

In communities across the United States, water managers and planners are emerging from the silos they’ve traditionally operated in to find new ways to work together. This is in part because climate change is causing turbulence for the water sector nationwide, in the form of prolonged droughts, damaging floods and wildfires, severe storms, and sea-level rise. The urgency of developing resilience in the face of these threats is becoming increasingly clear. Collaboration is also increasing because, although communities face many different challenges and operate with countless variations on municipal structures, many are rediscovering a singular truth about land and water: when you plan for one, you have to plan for both. 

“Water engineers are beginning to recognize they cannot provide sustainable services without involving those in the development community—including planners, architects, and community activists,” explains the American Planning Association’s Policy Guide on Water (APA 2016). “Leading edge planners are reaching across the aisle to water managers to help advise on their comprehensive plans, not only to meet environmental objectives, but also to add value and livability, rooted in the vision of the community.” 

How We Got Here

Picture the view from an airplane as you fly over rural areas or the outskirts of any major city: the way the right-angled boundaries of agricultural fields and housing plots contrast with the twisting braids of river channels and the irregular shape of lakes and ponds. Land and water are very different resources. They have been managed differently—and separately—as a result.

The divide between water and land planning has deep roots. Although water is connected to all parts of sustainable growth, from ecosystem health to economic viability, planners and water managers have long worked separately. From volunteer planning boards in rural communities to fully staffed departments in major cities, planners focus on land use and the built environment. Water managers, meanwhile, whether they are part of a municipally owned utility, private water company, or regional wholesaler, focus on providing a clean and adequate water supply. 

“I can’t think of a single city where [planning and water management] are contained within a single division,” says Ray Quay, a researcher at Arizona State University’s Global Institute of Sustainability who has served as both assistant director of land planning and assistant director of water services in Phoenix, Arizona. Quay says regional and watershed-wide development choices about growth often don’t line up with water supply.

“A typical divide would be that planners plan for growth while assuming the water utility will be able to supply water, while water utilities don’t participate in decisions about community growth, they just build infrastructure to serve the new growth that comes to them,” adds Jim Holway, director of the Babbitt Center for Land and Water Policy, which was created by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy in 2017 to advance the integration of land and water management.

Ivana Kajtezovic, planning program manager at Tampa Bay Water, a regional wholesale drinking water utility in Florida, confirms that lack of alignment. “Tampa Bay Water doesn’t have a say in growth in the counties and cities we serve,” says Kajtezovic. “Our only mission is to provide drinking water, no matter the growth or the speed of growth. Land use decisions are made by the counties and cities we serve.”

In a 2016 APA Water Working Group Water Survey, 75 percent of land use planners felt they were not involved enough in water planning and decisions (Stoker et al, 2018). “We know that land and water are connected, and no one ever argues that they’re separate,” says Philip Stoker, assistant professor of Planning at the University of Arizona, who conducted the APA survey. “It’s only people who have separated them.” 

This divide is partly a result of historical regulatory structures. “Water is very much state law-based, with some federal hooks into various aspects of it,” says Anne Castle, former assistant secretary for Water and Science at the U.S. Department of the Interior. Federal management involves regulations such as the Clean Water Act and agencies such as the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, and water rights are allocated at the state level. Meanwhile, although there is federal and state oversight of some public lands, most of the regulation and planning related to private land happens locally or regionally, reflecting individual and community rights and desires. While there are state-level initiatives to “put more emphasis on the consideration of water in developing land,” Castle says—including in Colorado, where she is based—there are still wide gaps in priorities and responsibilities.

Communities across the country are dealing with unique issues, of course, but Stoker’s survey suggests the barriers to solving them are similar: lack of time, lack of resources, fear of a loss of jurisdictional power if they surrender some control, and differences in education, experience, and technical language. It can be hard to surmount those issues. “Logically it should be easy, but when institutions grow up with a single focus, it’s hard to change their mission and expand into other places,” says Bill Cesanek, cochair of the APA Water & Planning Network. Cesanek says things work better when planners share the responsibility for determining where the water to meet future demands will come from.

Land and water planners have to work together, agrees Quay, and need to be realistic about where, how, and whether their communities can grow. “One of the really critical factors is political will,” he says. “We should be thinking about what’s most important for our community, and we should be allocating our water to that.” 

According to Holway of the Babbitt Center, that’s becoming more common. “With growing demand for water in the face of increasing challenges to acquiring new water supplies, utilities and land planners are having to figure out how to work together to maintain a balance between supply and demand.”  

“Too Much, Too Little, Too Dirty”

According to the APA Policy Guide on Water, water-related threats often fall along familiar lines: not enough water, thanks to increased population growth and climatic stress on top of already fully allocated or overallocated water supplies; too much water, due to flooding and rising sea levels; or compromised water quality due to agricultural and urban runoff and other sources of contamination. In every case, the urgency is growing.

Not enough water. In the Southwest—especially the overtapped Colorado River Basin, which serves 41 million people in seven U.S. and two Mexican states—persistent drought means diminishing snowpack, dwindling supplies in natural aquifers, and shrinking reservoirs. Researchers predict that Colorado River flows will decline by 20 to 35 percent by 2050 and 30 to 55 percent by the end of the century (Udall, 2017). 

The drought also has cascading impacts on water systems. For instance, increasingly frequent and large wildfires in dry Western forests are causing watershed contamination in areas that haven’t previously dealt with it, like the headwaters of the Colorado. During fires and for years afterward, according to the EPA, water can be polluted by ash, sediment, and other contaminants, which forces water managers to scramble for solutions. “I do think there’s a much greater trend of land use planning and water management collaboration occurring fastest in places that are facing scarcity,” Stoker says.

Too much water. Over the last 30 years, floods in the United States have caused an average of $8 billion in damages and 82 deaths per year (Cesanek 2017). As climate change fuels more extreme weather events, Quay says, floods are exceeding parameters defined by the Federal Emergency Management Agency that have traditionally guided planning decisions. Quay says it’s hard to adapt because our stationary planning guidelines and laws aren’t set up for those extremes. 

Places like low-lying Hoboken, New Jersey—where rising sea levels and superstorms like Hurricane Sandy have inundated sections of the city—are building water system resilience into their planning. The city is incorporating features like manmade urban sand dunes that work as physical barriers and can divert storm surges to newly built flood pumps. “The stormwater system is at the same level as the river—[stormwater] has nowhere to go, so they’ve had to build a really innovative resilience planning program,” Cesanek says.

Contaminated water. During heavy rains, which are increasingly frequent due to climate change, the combined sewer system in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, overflows into neighboring rivers and Lake Michigan, polluting the waterways, compromising the ecosystem, and affecting the water supply. “Stormwater gets into our combined and sanitary systems. Nothing is water-tight,” says Karen Sands, director of Planning, Research, and Sustainability at Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District (MMSD). Sands says MMSD has had to align at-odds geographic and jurisdictional layers to find solutions that protect the watershed. One of those solutions is the construction of 70-acre Menomonee stormwater park, built in conjunction with city planners, which is expected to treat 100 percent of runoff from industrial and commercial areas nearby. It both ensures a clean supply of water now, and preemptively manages demand for the future. 

Chi Ho Sham, president of the American Water Works Association, a nonprofit international organization for water supply professionals, says one of the group’s biggest concerns is water quality, particularly protecting water at the source, limiting pollutant use, and creating barriers to slow or prevent contamination. “From my point of view, our job is to work very collaboratively with landowners,” he says. “Water managers cannot do it alone.”

Infrastructure and Equity Issues

The U.S. population is projected to reach 517 million by 2050, and the fastest-growing cities are in the South and West (U.S. Census Bureau 2019). You can’t keep people from moving to Tempe or Tampa Bay, but this population growth is occurring in regions where the pressure on both water quality and quantity is already high. In some places, this rapid growth has forced the hand of planners and water managers, who have implemented water conservation and reuse measures to ensure there will be enough water to go around.

To complicate matters, our nation’s water infrastructure hasn’t kept up with changing demographics. Old lead pipes are disintegrating, and water treatment plants are overwhelmed by the amount of water they need to process. In 2017, the American Society of Civil Engineers gave the nation’s drinking water a D grade, estimating a cost of $100 billion for all the necessary infrastructure upgrades (ACES, 2017).

There is also a divide between places that can afford to upgrade their infrastructure and those that cannot. Addressing that inequity is crucial to securing future water supplies for everyone, says Katy Lackey, senior program manager at the nonprofit US Water Alliance, a national coalition of water utilities, businesses, environmental organizations, labor unions, and others which is working to secure a sustainable water future. 

“We believe water equity occurs when all communities have access to clean, safe, and affordable drinking water and wastewater services, infrastructure investments are maximized and benefit all communities, and communities are resilient in the face of a changing climate,” she says. Reaching that goal will require new ways of working.

How to Work Together Well

Integrated planning starts with getting people in the same room to understand the needs of their community, the gaps in current processes, and how they can better work together, says Holway of the Babbitt Center. From there, formalizing goals around planning and water is critical, whether those goals are reflected in a comprehensive or master plan for community development, in a more specific plan based on conservation and resilience, or in zoning and regulatory changes. 

“We are focused on identifying, evaluating, and promoting tools to better integrate land and water, with input from a diverse group of practitioners and researchers,” Holway says, noting that Babbitt Center Research Fellow Erin Rugland has produced several publications for practitioners, including a matrix of available tools for integrating land and water (Rugland 2021) and two manuals focused on best practices (Rugland 2020, Castle and Rugland 2019).

Those focused on the importance of integrating land and water say there are several factors that contribute to successful collaborations, including:

Build relationships. Stoker found that getting people out of their silos is an important first step. “In the places that have been the most successful at integrating land and water planning, the utilities and planners were friends. They knew that if they worked together, they would benefit,” he says. Stoker cites Aiken, South Carolina, where water managers helped build the comprehensive plan, as an example, adding that this kind of collaboration is important at every scale. In Westminster, Colorado, water managers participate in preapplication meetings for any new development. From the beginning, they have a chance to advise on how choices made about things like plumbing and landscaping will impact a project’s water use and fees.

Westminster is one of 33 western communities that have participated in the Growing Water Smart program, a multiday workshop run by the Babbitt Center and the Sonoran Institute with additional funding from the Colorado Water Conservation Board and the Gates Family Foundation. Growing Water Smart brings small teams of leaders together to communicate, collaborate, and identify a one-year action plan. 

“The heart of Growing Water Smart is getting land use planners and water managers from the same communities together to talk to each other, sometimes for the very first time,” says Faith Sternlieb of the Babbitt Center, who helps to facilitate the program. “Once they start sharing resources, data, and information, they see how valuable and important collaboration and cooperation are. It isn’t that they didn’t want to work together, it’s that they truly thought they had everything they needed to do their jobs. But they don’t often have the time and space they need to think and plan holistically.”   

“What has worked in my experience is to form relationships with the planners making decisions,” confirms Kajtezovic of Tampa Bay Water. “To the extent possible, I communicate with them and explain the importance of source water protection.”

Be creative and flexible. Once relationships are formed, creativity and flexibility are key. Because every community is facing different planning challenges, “context is incredibly important,” says Quay. This is true not just among different regions, but within regions, and sometimes even from one community to the next. “What works in Phoenix won’t necessarily work in Tempe [a city of nearly 200,000 just east of Phoenix], so we can’t just adapt best management practices, we have to think about best for who.” He recommends identifying a broad, flexible set of tools that can be used and adapted over time.

Be willing to learn. Because of specialization, planners and water managers “don’t speak the same language,” says Sham, who says the AWWA has been working on collaborative education about source water protection for members and landowners. Sometimes it feels like added work on the front end, and he says people can be reluctant to take on work that’s not in their purview, but developing a shared language and understanding is crucial for long-term sustainability. 

John Berggren helps communities coordinate land and water planning as a water policy analyst for Western Resource Advocates. He says one of his first steps is to educate local leaders and get them excited about including water in their comprehensive plans. “We get them interested and concerned about conservation, to create top-down support for planning departments and water utilities,” he says. Once water is codified in a comprehensive plan, he says, that allows planners and utilities to come up with creative, progressive solutions. 

Be comprehensive. The integration of land use and water planning works best when it is included in state-level regulations or in comprehensive plans at the community level. According to the Babbitt Center, 14 states formally incorporate water into planning in some form, and that number is growing. For example, the 2015 Colorado Water Plan set a goal that 75 percent of Coloradans will live in communities that have incorporated water-saving actions into land use planning by 2025; communities across the state are working on that process, and 80 communities would have to take action to hit the 2025 deadline. Colorado also recently passed state legislation that outlines water conservation guidelines for planning and designates a new position in the state government to support the coordination of land and water planning. 

Since 2000, when Arizona passed the Growing Smarter Plus Act, the state has required communities to include a chapter in their comprehensive plans that addresses the link between water supply, demand, and growth projections. It’s happening in less dry places, too. The Manatee County, Florida, comprehensive plan matches water quality with need to make the best use of non-potable water. It includes codes for water reuse and alternative water sources to increase availability, and to make sure that water gets to the most appropriate destination.

To incorporate water into comprehensive plans, Quay says, communities need a concrete idea of the type and amount of their available resources. Water managers and planners can then work together to identify new and alternative water sources like treated wastewater and graywater (household water that has been used for things like laundry and can still be used for flushing toilets); to identify projected demand; and to outline how to meet it.

Embrace the power of local action. Even if water-related planning is not mandated by the state or incorporated in a community’s comprehensive plan, water managers and planners can still find ways to collaborate. More specific local plans can include water supply and wastewater infrastructure plans; hazard mitigation and resilience plans, like floodplain and stormwater management; demand management; watershed processes and health; and plans for interagency coordination and collaboration. If those variables feel overwhelming, Berggren suggests that planners look to their peer communities for best practices. Although each community is different, he says, “no one needs to reinvent the wheel.” 

Local policy shifts can also include form-based codes that outline water-related aspects of the built environment. In Milwaukee, Sands says best practices for managing flooding and pollution include “updating municipal codes and ordinances to encourage green infrastructure and more sustainable practices.” That green infrastructure, which mimics natural processes at the site level through things like bioswales and stormwater storage, can make communities more resilient to climate change, while restoring ecosystems and protecting water supply.  

Water-wise policy shifts can also come in the form of zoning ordinances, like smaller lot sizes. Planners can use subdivision and land development regulations to promote on-site capture, infiltration, and slow release of stormwater. Some communities have adopted plumbing codes that require high efficiency fixtures, or building codes that permit water recycling, or submetering to increase efficiency in multifamily residences. Fountain, Colorado, has conservation-oriented tap fees, which incentivize developers to meet water efficiency standards beyond the building code. Developers can pay lower tap fees if they agree to options like native landscaping or including efficient indoor fixtures across a development.

The benefits of integrating land and water planning are myriad, from measurable results like adapting plans for development to ensure an adequate water supply to more indirect, long-term effects like reducing conflict between water users as supplies shrink. Back in Castle Rock, Schultz and his colleagues have observed that water-focused land use ordinances can have a big impact, and can benefit quality of life as a whole. It hasn’t always been easy, Schultz says, but the new way of doing things seems to be paying off: “We’ve shown that we can do better if we provide a good foundation.” 

Heather Hansman is a freelance journalist, Outside magazine’s environmental columnist, and the author of the recent book Downriver: Into the Future of Water in the West.

Lead Photograph: In Castle Rock, Colorado, planners and water utility managers have partnered on plans for sustainable growth. Credit: Robert Young via iStock Editorial/Getty Images Plus.

References

APA (American Planning Association). 2016. APA Policy Guide on Water. Chicago, IL: American Planning Association. https://www.planning.org/policy/guides/adopted/water/.

ACES (American Society of Civil Engineers). 2017. Infrastructure Report Card. Washington, DC: American Society of Civil Engineers. https://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/.

Castle, Anne, and Erin Rugland. 2019. “Best Practices for Implementing Water Conservation and Demand Management Through Land Use Planning Efforts: Addendum to 2012 Guidance Document.” Denver, CO: Colorado Water Conservation Board. January. https://dnrweblink.state.co.us/cwcbsearch/ElectronicFile.aspx?docid=208193&dbid=0.

Cesanek, William, Vicki Elmer, and Jennifer Graeff. 2017. Planners and Water: PAS Report 588. Chicago, IL: American Planning Association. https://www.planning.org/publications/report/9131532/.

Rugland, Erin. 2021. “Integrating Land and Water: Tools, Practices, Processes, and Evaluation Criteria.” Working paper. Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. https://www.lincolninst.edu/publications/working-papers/integrating-land-water. (February).

Rugland, Erin. 2020. Incorporating Water into Comprehensive Planning: A Manual for Land Use Planners in the Colorado River Basin. Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. https://www.lincolninst.edu/publications/other/incorporating-water-comprehensive-planning.

Stoker, Philip Anthony, Gary Pivo, Alexandra Stoicof, Jacob Kavkewitz, Neil Grigg, and Carol Howe. 2018. Joining-Up Urban Water Management with Urban Planning and Design. Alexandria, VA: The Water Resource Foundation. https://www.waterrf.org/research/projects/joining-urban-water-management-urban-planning-and-design.

Udall, Bradley, and Overpeck, Jonathan. 2017. “The Twenty‐First Century Colorado River Hot Drought and Implications for the Future.” Water Resources Research 53 (3): 1763-2576.

U.S. Census Bureau. 2019. “Fastest-Growing Cities Primarily in the South and West.” Press release. May 23. https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2019/subcounty-population-estimates.html.

Related

Growing Water Smart: Workshop Helps Western Communities Integrate Water and Land Use Planning

Water Planning: Land Use Decisions Could Make or Break the River that Sustains One in Nine Americans

Land and water policy can shape the built and natural environment to reduce the extent of climate change and help communities and natural systems withstand the impacts of a changing climate. The Lincoln Institute is advancing good planning practices to address these challenges and aspires to foster climate justice as a key element of this work. We reached out to people across our global network to ask them this question: If you could implement one land-based solution during 2021 that would have a meaningful impact on climate change, what would it be?

Kongjian Yu
Founder and President, Turenscape
Contributor, Nature and Cities

The most effective and holistic solution to climate change is “sponge lands.” Expanding on the concept of “sponge cities,” which uses green infrastructure to absorb stormwater and combat pollution in urban areas, this land-based solution can retain rainwater at the source, slow the water in the course of its flow, and be used adaptively at its outlets (rivers, lakes, and oceans). This is completely opposite to the conventional engineering solutions widely used across the globe, particularly in developing countries in the monsoon climate: damming rivers to create big reservoirs, channelizing water using concrete flood walls, building concrete drainage in the city, and pumping water out. Gray infrastructure consumes huge amounts of cement, creating a significant amount of carbon emissions, suffocating the most productive ecosystems with the highest biodiversity, and making land less resilient. Sponge lands means the creation of porosity in vast, hilly landscapes that are suffering from erosion; the creation of “sponge fields” in the form of small ponds in farmland where runoff pollutes nearby rivers and lakes; and the creation of sponge cities. Sponge lands means the prudent use of cement in hydrological engineering and pavement in urban areas. It also means the removal of concrete flood walls and dams along waterways to restore habitat, replenish groundwater, nurture lush vegetation, and create other benefits. Sponge lands are an efficient, inexpensive solution that will empower the resiliency of the land against climate change.

Linda Shi
Assistant Professor of City and Regional Planning, Cornell University
C. Lowell Harriss Dissertation Fellow, 2015–2016

The United States needs a national climate adaptation plan that includes a land use and development strategy. Efforts related to carbon dioxide removal and renewable energy, such as biofuels and solar arrays, will significantly impact rural land use. Failure to decarbonize means escalating climate impacts, climate-induced migration, and new landscapes of injustices in the form of climate oases and climate slums. Growing urban–rural political conflict already reflects spatial and socioeconomic inequality, rooted in rural resource and human extraction for processes of urbanization, dynamics that the climate crisis can exacerbate. Market responses will not be sufficient in scale, target geographies that can sustainably accommodate growth, or enable a just climate transition. The magnitude of needed actions to tackle the climate crisis therefore requires a new national architecture of land policy. This includes (1) science- and equity-informed identification of geographies where future growth and investment should go; (2) fiscal, investment, and grant policies that enable local governments to respond to climate impacts rather than burden them with unfunded mandates or punitive measures; and (3) legal reforms to banking and organizational regulations that would expand cooperative ownership models that help build community control of housing and land for local wealth retention and creation.

Alan Mallach
Senior Fellow, Center for Community Progress
Coauthor, Regenerating America’s Legacy Cities

The zoning of America’s suburbs, resulting in a suburban landscape dominated by large single-family houses on large lots and by vast areas—often largely vacant—zoned for industrial and office use, has fostered an auto-dependent pattern of widely dispersed population and employment centers which in turn has led to increased emissions from vehicular travel, as well as from energy use for lighting, heating, and cooling. It has also curtailed housing production, exacerbated housing affordability problems, and led to millions of lower-income workers making long daily treks from urban centers to suburban jobs. Solutions are straightforward, and do not require undoing single-family zoning. State zoning statutes should require municipalities to allow accessory apartments and structures in single-family zones wherever feasible from a health and safety standpoint, permit multifamily housing along commercial corridors and in industrial or office zones, and rezone bypassed vacant parcels, of which dozens exist in nearly every American suburb, for multifamily housing. Higher residential densities along corridors and in mixed-use clusters will, in turn, vastly increase the opportunities for cost-effective, efficient transit solutions. Increased and diversified housing options in already largely developed suburbs will address unmet housing needs and reduce the pressure for further outward expansion of metros, making the suburbs themselves more sustainable in the face of demographic shifts, changing housing demands, and future climate shocks.

Sivan Kartha
Senior Scientist, Stockholm Environment Institute
Advisor, Lincoln Institute Climate Program

A survey across 64 countries estimated that forests held collectively by indigenous peoples and forest communities contain approximately one trillion tons worth of carbon dioxide, equal to more than three decades’ worth of global emissions from fossil fuel use. These lands are also among the world’s richest in biodiversity and home to vital freshwater resources. However, those living in these forests often lack formally recognized land rights. Forest-rich countries generally have colonial legacies, in which land and resources were seized at the expense of local communities. Centuries-old property rights and land tenure regimes originally set up for taxation and extraction persist, contributing to the continued degradation of forest resources. A growing body of research shows that when land rights are formally recognized and legally safeguarded, indigenous peoples and local communities can protect common resources through informal practices and collective action that prevent deforestation, preserve biodiversity, and protect ecosystem services such as soil enrichment and watershed health. Imposing conventional private property regimes, on the other hand, can cause new problems, triggering land speculation and clashing with local cultural norms. Establishing secure land tenure rights for indigenous peoples and rural communities can help preserve the world’s declining forest resources, while safeguarding the livelihoods on which their hundreds of millions of residents depend.

Tamika Butler
Built Environment and Equity Consultant, TLB Consulting
Guest Speaker, Big City Planning Directors Institute

My hope for 2021 is that the increased attention, conversation, and resource allocation directed toward fighting racism, white supremacy, and anti-Blackness will not disappear with the flip of a calendar page as people push toward “getting back to normal.” Just being better than it is now shouldn’t be enough. As a Black person, I could look at the statistics and know that the old normal meant my life was expendable. As a Black person, I also know that in this new normal, I can look at any statistic about COVID-19, hate crimes, or environmental racism and see that my life is still expendable. Beyond not being good enough, “getting back to normal” will not meaningfully impact climate change. Instead, I hope that those in power examine who they are listening to and funding when it comes to land-based solutions. The ideas, solutions, and pursuits of fighting climate change with land-based solutions should focus on ensuring that we listen to Black people, Indigenous people, and other racialized people and members of historically oppressed groups who have long been leaders in climate change, sustainability, and serving as protectors of humanity. All climate change solutions should center the idea that in 2021 we must stop the killing of Black people, Indigenous people, and other people of color.

Melinda Lis Maldonado
Lawyer, Matanza-Riachuelo River Basin Authority, Argentina
Instructor, Lincoln Institute, Latin America and the Caribbean

The implementation of development charges with environmental components would have a meaningful impact on climate change. These are building or urban permits that consider water and vegetation aspects as requirements to exercise basic or additional building rights. To illustrate the last case, in exchange for increasing density, adding land for green urban spaces could be an additional charge. These urban planning tools could finance climate change adaptation and mitigation, because they could generate, at the local level, resources to finance conservation or the implementation of green and blue infrastructure in private or public spaces. Nature-based solutions would be prioritized. Nature can provide more affordable long-term solutions and more benefits to humans and cities than solutions that only use gray infrastructure. At the same time, such solutions can function as mitigation and adaptation measures. These requirements would typically be fulfilled in the same place where the building occurs, in the form of sustainable drainage, reforestation, or green space. In some exceptions, they would involve financing green infrastructure in another place. Attaching environmental conditions to building rights would take different forms according to local climate change effects and the magnitude of the urban development project. Urban planning, law, and private property regulation have an important role to play in facing climate change.

Frederick Steiner
Dean, University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design
Coeditor, Design with Nature Now

While we work on enacting effective policy, we need to change our hearts and minds about climate change and adjust how we live accordingly. Everyone reading this would make a list of 365 personal activities that contribute to climate change and make a commitment to replace them, one each day, with an action to mitigate or adapt to climate change. By sharing their pledge on social media, they could encourage their family, friends, and followers to do the same. Each of these actions ties back to land, water, and energy. For example: 

using a copier planting a tree
building a patio digging a garden
driving a car taking a walk
complaining about politicians calling and emailing representatives
ordering a book online visiting a local bookstore
buying imported produce growing a tomato
dropping off dry cleaning learning to iron
grilling beef eating a cricket
flying to a conference organizing a Zoom
turning on the air conditioner opening a window
cutting the grass planting native flowers
upgrading your cable watching birds

and so on for another 353 days.

Astrid R. N. Haas
Policy Director, International Growth Centre

From a governmental perspective, implementing land-based solutions in my own country, Uganda, is inherently challenging. In part this is because our Constitution, and all subsequent legislative instruments pertaining to land, unequivocally vest land in the people. In addition, Uganda has multiple coexisting tenure systems, yet limited administrative capacity to delineate each of them or document ownership. This situation means the government’s ability to implement land-based solutions, which unlock public value, is extremely limited. It is within this context that in 2021 I would therefore pursue land readjustment as an entirely practical approach and the most viable land-based solution. Particularly within urban areas, this tool [a model in which landowners pool their properties to accomplish a redevelopment project] has enormous potential. For example, working at a local level, it would be possible to determine land tenure and ownership and elicit community buy-in to pool parcels for more densified development. There is growing evidence that denser cities are greener and more climate efficient. Therefore, this solution would not only have a significant impact on the efficiency of how Ugandan cities could be managed, particularly with regards to public service provision, it would have a meaningful impact on climate change as well.

Larry Clark
Director of Strategic Initiatives, International Association of Assessing Officers

I am an appraiser with 40 years of experience working in three local jurisdictions, writing articles, lecturing, and teaching mass appraisal in many parts of the United States and the world. My association with people from many parts of the world has given me an appreciation for the issues surrounding climate change. One of the realities of climate change is that water resources are poorly distributed among our 50 states. Climate change exacerbates that situation by causing droughts in one part of the country while the warmer atmosphere brings soaking rains and floods to another. Therefore, my wish would be for the development of a nationwide network of reservoirs and distribution systems to collect and redistribute precipitation nationally. It would require an effort similar in scope to the federal highway system begun under President Eisenhower, and should be governed by a regulatory body that prioritizes humanitarian needs above those of agriculture and commerce. Collection systems should be sited in areas of current and anticipated future flooding, as well as natural runoff, to feed into reservoirs for later distribution into municipal water systems where it is needed.

Forster Ndubisi
Professor of Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning, Texas A&M University
Author, Ecology in Urban Design and Planning

Climate solutions require us to fundamentally rethink our ethical relations to the land. I propose that we initiate the process of critical reflection on our ethical obligations to the land and adopt a place-based ecocentric ethic (PBEE) as one climate solution in 2021. The adoption of PBEE via lifelong immersive education stipulates the ethical behavior and moral obligations that designers and planners should adhere to in addressing climate challenges. PBEE is based on the interdependency between people and biophysical [nature] processes, in which each depends on the other for continued existence. Human interactions with natural processes will necessarily result in the degradation of natural resources and processes [natural capital] to a certain degree, including landscapes that provide vital ecosystem services. By implication, PBEE confers the moral imperative for preserving natural capital when feasible; conserving natural capital when a justifiable degree of use is demonstrated; replenishing natural capital through active restoration of degraded ecosystems; minimizing the extent of human footprint; reducing carbon usage; and actively embracing environmental stewardship. To combat climate change effectively, PBEE employs ecological knowing as a process for understanding the interdependency between human and natural ecosystems. In turn, ecological knowing works best by using a coupled system-design thinking process and participatory collaboration in creating climate mitigation and adaptation solutions.

Robin Bronen
Executive Director, Alaska Institute for Justice
Steering Committee, Climigration Network

Return stolen lands to Indigenous Peoples and erase the borders and boundaries that divide and separate the ecosystems upon which we depend. Indigenous Peoples have conserved the biodiversity of this planet for millennia. The one-fourth of the Earth’s land occupied by Indigenous Peoples coincides with 40 percent of the natural areas protected and territories that remain undamaged. According to studies undertaken by the World Bank, these territories hold 80 percent of the planet’s biodiversity. In the United States, settler colonialism created the legal and institutional structures that forcibly removed and relocated Indigenous populations from their traditional lands and recast Indigenous Peoples’ land as property and as a resource. Repatriating land to Indigenous Peoples, as the original stewards of these lands now known as the United States, helps to rectify this injustice. Removing the social construction of boundaries and borders that artificially divides land and erasing these invisible lines ensures that the ecosystems and biodiversity upon which humanity depends can thrive as the climate crisis transforms the web of life.

Cintia Fernandes
Lawyer for the Municipality of Curitiba, Brazil
Instructor, Lincoln Institute, Latin America and the Caribbean

Considering the socioeconomic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, both local and metropolitan solutions are necessary to prevent unwanted impacts on the environment, such as pollution, garbage accumulation, and reduction of green areas. Cities must have connectivity, systemic thinking, and metropolitan sustainability. Cities must implement both a circular economy and circular taxation, strengthening real estate and environmental taxes in order to permit swifter, more effective and efficient local responses. These systems may also result in less corruption, a better quality of life, and the mitigation of climate changes. Aiming to achieve this, we propose a circular tax, an intelligent fiscal tool for the construction and development of cities and metropolitan regions. This entails the strengthening of real estate taxation (property tax, taxation differentiated by use and location, betterment tax) and of environmental taxes (garbage collection and recycling fees, tax on metropolitan environmental threats, application of the polluter pays principle). A circular tax would strengthen planning and sustainable urban management and is a land policy that can help preserve the environment.

Photograph: Aerial view of a solar power station in Germany. Credit: Bim/Getty Images.

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In the fall of 2018, water managers in Arizona were in heated discussions about how to limit the damage from a decades-long megadrought on the Colorado River. The drought has forced painful reckonings and realignments related to water use throughout the Colorado River Basin. Because of the way the water has been allocated over time, it had become clear that Arizona would bear the brunt of the looming shortages—and that farmers in the state, many of whom have low-priority water rights, would face severe cuts.

At a meeting that October, Stefanie Smallhouse, president of the Arizona Farm Bureau, denounced the proposed cuts. She suggested that the proposals showed disrespect for farmers, in particular for a white settler named Jack Swilling who, in her telling, had heroically made the desert bloom. “I find it’s ironic that we are exactly 150 years from the first farmer starting the settlement [of] the Phoenix area,” Smallhouse said. “There wasn’t anybody else here. There [were] relics of past tribal farming, but [Swilling] was pretty much the starter.”

Later in the meeting, Stephen Roe Lewis spoke. Lewis is the governor of the Gila River Indian Community, a reservation south of Phoenix that is home to members of the Akimel O’otham and Pee Posh tribes. The Akimel O’otham trace their heritage to the Huhugam civilization, which constructed a massive system of irrigation canals to support the cultivation of cotton, corn, and other crops in the area beginning about 1,400 years ago. But in the 1870s and 1880s, new canal systems built primarily by white farmers drained the Gila River, devastating the Akimel O’otham and Pee Posh farms and leading to famine and starvation. “History is important,” Governor Lewis stated, correcting Smallhouse’s account of Swilling finding only “relics” of tribal farming. “We’ve been farming for over 1,000 years, and the only time that was disrupted was when that water was taken away from us.”

The Gila River Indian Community has, in fact, spent much of the past 150 years trying to win back water its members had long depended on. In 2004, a congressionally approved settlement awarded the community a substantial quantity of water from the Colorado. Since then, the community has actively worked to protect those rights. “We will be here as long as it takes to find solutions,” Lewis told the assembled stakeholders in 2018. “But we will fight to the end to make sure that our water is not taken again.”

As that exchange illustrates, the long history of Native Americans in the Colorado River Basin is often ignored in discussions about the management of the resource, as are their social, cultural, and environmental attachments to the river. The comments from Lewis indicate how committed today’s tribal leaders are to changing that. Since the late 1970s, tribes in the region have won a series of settlements confirming their rights to Colorado River water. Today, tribes control an estimated 20 percent of the water in the river. As the entire basin faces the reality of serious shortages, it has become clear that tribes—which have sovereignty under the U.S. Constitution, giving them the right to govern themselves—must be key players in any conversation about the future.

The stakes are considerable, not just for tribes but for everyone who depends on the Colorado. Some 41 million people in seven American and two Mexican states use water from the river, which irrigates more than four million acres of farmland. If the Colorado watershed were a separate country, it would be among the 10 largest economies in the world. But drought and other effects of climate change are pushing the river beyond its ability to meet the enormous demands on it, bringing tribes more squarely into the river’s politics.

To improve the ability of tribes to manage their water, and to give them a stronger voice in management discussions and decisions in the basin, several organizations launched the Water & Tribes Initiative (WTI) in 2017, with funding from the Babbitt Center for Land and Water Policy, a program of the Lincoln Institute. Leaders of the project, which is now also funded by the Walton Family Foundation, Catena Foundation, and several other partners, include a cross-section of tribal representatives, current and former state and federal officials, researchers, conservation groups, and others.

“If we work together, we can find solutions to these issues,” says Daryl Vigil, a member of the Jicarilla Apache Nation and co-facilitator of WTI. He says this is a delicate time for the tribes: “If we’re not ahead of this game, in terms of just a basic recognition of tribal sovereignty in this process, there are huge risks.”

“We are excited to be part of this evolving and growing partnership,” says Jim Holway, director of the Babbitt Center. “The work WTI is doing is critical to the long-term sustainability of the basin and is central to our goal of improving the links between land and water management.”

Divided Waters

The 29 federally recognized tribes in the Colorado River Basin have long lived within a paradox. In 1908, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that tribes have a right to water for their reservations. In the first come, first served hierarchy of western water law, the Court dealt them a powerful trump card, ruling that a tribe’s water rights were based on the date its reservation was created. Since most reservations were established by the U.S. government in the second half of the 1800s, tribes are theoretically in a stronger position than any of the other users on the river. Like the Akimel O’otham and Pee Posh, all of the tribes were here long before non-native settlers.

But when representatives from the seven basin states gathered in 1922 to draw up the Colorado River Compact, they pushed tribes into the background. The compact specifies the division of water among California, Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and New Mexico and laid the foundation of a complex web of agreements, laws, and court rulings collectively known as the “Law of the River”—which essentially ignored Indians. (See the special issue of Land Lines, January 2019, for an in-depth exploration of the river and its history.) Although the compact briefly acknowledges “the obligations of the United States to American Indian tribes,” it does not go into detail about tribal water rights. As the scholar Daniel McCool has noted, “the omission of any consideration of Indian rights left unresolved one of the most important problems in the basin” (McCool 2003).

The author and historian Philip Fradkin put a finer point on it, declaring that “the Colorado is essentially a white man’s river.” But Anglo settlers had ignored Indians at their peril, he noted: the unresolved issue of Indians’ true rights to water from the Colorado was a “sword of Damocles” hanging over the river’s future (Fradkin 1996).

The full extent of Indian water rights is still not quantified. In the early 1970s, federal policy took a radically new course, adopting the principle of tribal self-determination. That led to tribes negotiating directly with the federal government to settle their water rights. In 1978, Arizona’s Ak-Chin Indian Community was the first to do so; since then, 36 water-rights settlements have been negotiated between tribes, other water-rights holders in the basin, and state and federal agencies. “The onset of negotiated settlements was an important part of the evolution” of tribal water rights, says Jason Robison, a law professor at the University of Wyoming. “But the features they’ve come to incorporate have also broken new ground.”

While tribal water rights were originally seen primarily as a necessity for farming on reservations, the settlements of the 20th century allowed some tribes to lease their water rights to users outside their reservations. This came to be seen as an economic development tool and a way to fund basic services for tribal members.

For the Navajo Nation in Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah, tying water to economic development is “all about creating a permanent homeland, where people go off, get educated, and come home,” says Bidtah Becker, a tribal member and attorney who has long been involved in water issues as a Navajo Nation government official. “We’re trying to develop a thriving homeland that people come home to, that works.”

In many cases, tribes don’t have the physical infrastructure to put their allocated water to use. Throughout the United States, Native American households are 19 times more likely than white households to lack indoor plumbing. On the Navajo Nation, the widespread lack of water services has likely contributed to the tribe’s horrendous losses to COVID-19; at one point in 2020, the nation had a higher per capita infection rate than any U.S. state (Dyer 2020). “Between 70,000 and 80,000 Navajos still haul water [to their homes] on a daily basis,” Vigil says. “In our country, in 2020, there’s still 70,000 to 80,000 people who aren’t connected to water infrastructure in a pandemic. It’s crazy.”

Vigil is the Water Administrator for the Jicarilla Apache Nation in New Mexico. In a 1992 settlement with the U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI), the tribe was allotted 40,000 acre-feet (roughly 13 billion gallons) of water per year, which it leased to the operator of a coal-fired power plant. The lease helped fund annual payments to tribal members for many years. But as the economy shifted toward green energy, the leases were not renewed. “So all of a sudden we’re left with settlement water stored [in a reservoir] 40 to 45 miles away, with no ability to use that water,” Vigil says.

Given the current drought, he says, the tribe could easily lease its water to others, but the terms of its federal settlement prohibit leasing water outside of New Mexico. Instead, the water flows out of the tribe’s hands and into the hands of other users. “No mechanisms are available to take our water outside of state boundaries,” Vigil says. “For the last two years, we’ve had over 30,000 acre-feet of unleased water going down the river.”

The ability to lease water can give tribes leverage—and an economic boost. In a hard-fought 2004 settlement, the Gila River Indian Community (GRIC) secured rights to more than twice as much water as the city of Las Vegas. It has used those rights to become a major, though often overlooked, force in Arizona water policies and politics. The tribe participated in negotiations around the Drought Contingency Plan (DCP), a multiyear, basinwide agreement signed in 2019 to address the impacts of the decades-long drought (Jenkins 2019).

States negotiated their own agreements as part of the DCP process; in Arizona, GRIC agreed to leave some of its water in Lake Mead, the reservoir that provides water to the Lower Basin, and to lease another portion to the Central Arizona Groundwater Replenishment District to address concerns about long-term water supplies for new development. Together, the two deals could be worth as much as $200 million to the tribe.

The Colorado River Indian Tribes (CRIT)—a community that includes the Mohave, Chemehuevi, Hopi, and Navajo tribes on a reservation spanning the river in Arizona and California—was also an important participant in the DCP. The community’s participation was not without internal controversy: some tribal members were opposed to the DCP and attempted to recall the members of their tribal council. Ultimately CRIT agreed to leave up to 8 percent of its annual allocation in Lake Mead for three years in exchange for compensation of $30 million from the state of Arizona and an additional $8 million pledge from a group of foundations and corporations organized by the Walton Family Foundation and Water Funder Initiative.

The DCP negotiations were complex and contentious. In the end, coming to a resolution required getting tribes, cities, farmers, and other major stakeholders to the table.

The Relationship Between Tribal and State Allocations

When a tribe wins the right to use or lease a certain amount of Colorado River water, that water is considered part of the allocation of the state where the tribe is based. Because the states have individual allocations of water under the laws and agreements governing the river, newly negotiated tribal water settlements reduce the amount of water available for other users in that state. In the past, when tribal water allocations were not used, this water was left in the system for use by others. This issue is particularly acute in Arizona, where 22 of the 29 basin tribes have reservations. With the water rights of many tribes still unrecognized and unquantified, tribes and other stakeholders are understandably on edge about the future availability of water in the drought-stricken basin and intent on finding ways to work together to ensure a sustainable future.

To access policy briefs, reports, and other materials produced by the Water & Tribes Initiative, visit www.naturalresourcespolicy.org/projects/watertribes-colorado-river-basin.

Bridging the Gap

Since its inception, WTI has aimed to improve the tribes’ abilities to advance their interests and to promote sustainable water management in the basin through collaborative problem-solving. “We walk a tightrope,” says Matt McKinney, who co-facilitates the initiative with Vigil. McKinney is a longtime mediator who directs the Center for Natural Resources & Environmental Policy at the University of Montana. “On the one hand, it’s pretty easy to see us being advocates for tribes, which we are. But the larger frame is that we’re advocates for a fair, equitable, effective process of solving problems and making decisions.”

“The success of tribal water settlements has been based on the relationships of the people in the room,” says Margaret Vick, an attorney for the Colorado River Indian Tribes. “And the Water & Tribes Initiative has expanded the [number of] people in the room.” WTI is now working to shift away from narrow negotiations on individual water settlements to a much broader conversation spanning the basin: the current guidelines for managing the river will expire at the end of 2026, and new guidelines for the next several decades will soon be hammered out. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation (USBR)—the division of DOI that manages the Colorado and other western waterways—is reviewing the past decade and a half of negotiations and operations to prepare for the next round. “We need a more inclusive renegotiation process,” says Morgan Snyder, senior program officer at the Walton Family Foundation’s environment program. “This is the opportunity to influence the next 25 years of water management in the basin.”

Anticipating the renegotiation process, McKinney and Vigil conducted interviews in 2019 with more than 100 people, including tribal leaders, water managers, and others involved in water issues in the region, to identify major issues facing the basin as well as ways to enhance collaborative problem-solving, particularly tribal participation in decisions about the river. WTI held workshops with tribal members and other interested parties from across the basin to identify strategies to enhance tribal and stakeholder engagement.

“Many interviewees believe it is time to move beyond managing the river as a plumbing and engineering system that supplies water to cities and farms and toward a more holistic, integrated system that better accommodates multiple needs and interests, including but not limited to tribal sacred and cultural values, ecological and recreational values, and the integration of land and water management decisions,” McKinney and Vigil wrote. “The intent here is to articulate a holistic, integrated vision and then make progress toward that vision incrementally over some period of time . . . and to move from a system focused on water use to watershed management” (WTI 2020).

To raise awareness, increase understanding, and catalyze conversations, WTI is issuing a series of policy briefs on topics ranging from the enduring role of tribes in the basin to a systemwide vision for sustainability. It is also helping the Ten Tribes Partnership, a coalition created in 1992 to increase the influence of tribes in Colorado River water management, develop a strategic plan.

But changing the nature of water management negotiations—to say nothing of the nature of water management itself—will not be easy. “Just like any other really complicated process, you have to figure out a way to break it down,” says Colby Pellegrino, deputy general manager for the Southern Nevada Water Authority, which supplies water to Las Vegas and its suburbs. “You have to eat the elephant that is Colorado River law and all of the interrelated problems one bite at a time. This presents issues if different stakeholder groups have differing opinions on the scope of negotiations.”

Some tribes have been frustrated by the difficulty of making their voices heard, even though they are sovereign nations. “We’re not ‘stakeholders,’” Vigil says. “We always get thrown into the same pool as NGOs, conservation groups. But it’s like, ‘No, we’re sovereigns.’”

The federal and state governments have also made some significant missteps. In 2009, the USBR launched a major study to assess current and future supply and demand along the river (USBR 2012), yet tribes weren’t meaningfully included in that process. Only after pressure from several tribes did the bureau commission a study of tribal water allotments, conducted with the Ten Tribes Partnership and released years later (USBR 2018). That study outlines the barriers to the full development of tribal water rights and analyzes the potential impacts of tribes developing those rights—especially for other users who have come to rely on the water that long went unused by the tribes. And in 2013, the basin states and the federal government began discussions about the Drought Contingency Plan without notifying tribes.

“States have ignored tribal water rights and tribal water use since the compact in the 1920s,” Vick says. “The [supply and demand study] was a state-driven process, and the states did not understand tribal water rights and were rarely involved in even considering what goes on on the reservation, as far as water use. They can’t [do this] anymore, because there has to be a full understanding to be able to manage the 20-year drought that we’re in.”

One basic but critical remaining challenge is finding a common way to understand and discuss issues related to the river. Anne Castle, a former assistant secretary for water and science at the DOI who held responsibility for the USBR from 2009 to 2014, is now a member of WTI’s leadership team. “The challenge is that we’re not talking about just having additional people—tribal representatives—at the table,” she says. “Those tribal representatives bring different values to the table as well. We haven’t really dealt with those cultural and spiritual and ecological values in these sorts of discussions previously.”

Bridging that gap is a slow process, Castle adds. “When you have spoken one language for as many years as state water managers have . . . to be exposed to a different way of talking about water is difficult,” she says. “But the converse is also true: it takes [tribal representatives] a long time of sitting in meetings and listening to understand how what state water managers are talking about will impact them.”

What Comes Next

The coming renegotiations “are a very important inflection point in how the basin states and the federal government treat tribal sovereignty in the Colorado River Basin going forward,” says Robison of the University of Wyoming. “When that process gets mapped out, you’ll be able to see, okay, to what extent are the tribes again being pushed to the margins? To what extent are the basin-state principals and the feds willing to actually not kick the can down the road?”

In a hopeful sign of potential collaboration, several large water agencies are contributing funding to the Water & Tribes Initiative, including the Southern Nevada Water Authority, Denver Water, the Imperial (CA) Irrigation District, the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, and the Central Arizona Project. The Nature Conservancy and other environmental groups have provided support for WTI convenings as well.

Exactly how tribes might get a more substantial voice in decisions about the river’s future isn’t clear. One proposal that emerged from WTI’s basinwide interviews in 2019 is for the creation of a sovereign review team that would include state, federal, and tribal representatives, perhaps supplemented by an advisory council of representatives from each of the basin’s 29 tribes.

No matter how the negotiations are structured, much is at stake for all involved. While there seems to be a general commitment to consensus and collaboration, there is a fundamental tension at the heart of the endeavor. As McKinney notes, “One of the tribes’ fundamental interests is to develop and use their water rights. That interest seems to be diametrically opposed to the current interests of the basin states and the objectives of the DCP, which are all about using less water.” Historically, unused tribal water has been used by nontribal entities, in some cases allowing those entities to exceed their allocations. Now, in an era of long-term drought and climate change, there’s less and less water to go around. “You can see,” says McKinney, “that the basin is faced with some difficult conversations and tough choices.”

For most tribes, the choice is clear. “We need to develop our water rights,” says Crystal Tulley-Cordova, principal hydrologist for the Navajo Nation’s Department of Water Resources. “We shouldn’t be expected to forfeit our development.”

One of the most contentious issues centers on the ability of tribes to lease their water to users outside the boundaries of their reservations. Allowing tribes to lease their water—or not—is one of the principal sources of leverage that individual states have over the tribes within their boundaries. “Given that tribal water rights are counted as part of the allocation for the state in which the reservation is located, tribes need to work with state officials and other water users to find mutual gain solutions that balance everyone’s needs and interests,” says McKinney.

Vigil agrees and emphasizes that a tribe’s right to do what it wants with its water, whether using it for farming or economic development on tribal lands or leasing it to other users, is a key tenet of the self-determination principle codified in federal policy since the 1970s. “The heart of it goes to those foundational concepts of an ability to determine your own future,” Vigil says. “And that’s what sovereignty is to me.”

Finding Common Ground

WTI is already helping tribes work toward the kind of solidarity that will make it difficult for any entity to ignore their collective voice. Recently, 17 tribal leaders joined together to send a letter to the DOI about the next stage of negotiations. “When Tribes are included in major discussions and actions concerning the Colorado River, we can contribute—as we already have—to the creative solutions needed in an era of increasing water scarcity,” the letter read. “We believe frequent communication, preferably face-to-face, is appropriate and constructive.”

“The ‘Law of the River’ is always evolving,” says Holway of the Babbitt Center. “I am optimistic that we will better incorporate the perspectives and interests of the broader community in future Colorado River management discussions; in the face of increasing water scarcity, a broader base of engagement will be essential. I am also hopeful we will be seeing a stronger tribal voice within the U.S. Department of the Interior.” (At press time, President-elect Joe Biden had nominated Rep. Deb Haaland of New Mexico to serve as secretary of the Interior; Haaland would be the first Native American to head the agency and the first Native American Cabinet secretary.)

The guiding principle for WTI, McKinney says, is “to build on the collaborative culture in the basin and to focus on common ground, to build a sense of momentum by working on the 80 percent of the issues where tribal and other water leaders can agree—and then circle back around to address the differences.”

That focus on common ground is helping to create stronger ties not just among tribes, but also between tribes and the established water management community. “One of the great things about the Water & Tribes Initiative is that it’s trying to create this network of people who can all rely on each other,” says Colby Pellegrino. “It’s building a web for people to walk across instead of a tightrope.”

Matt Jenkins is a freelance writer who has contributed to the New York Times, Smithsonian, Men’s Journal, and numerous other publications.

Photograph: A member of the Cocopah Tribe surveys the tribe’s former fishing grounds along the Colorado River. Climate change and severe drought are leading to critical water shortages throughout the Colorado River Basin. Credit: Pete McBride.

References

Dyer, Jan. 2020. “Practicing Infection Prevention in Isolated Populations: How the Navajo Nation Took on COVID-19.” August 17. Infection Control Today 24(8). https://www.infectioncontroltoday.com/view/how-the-navajo-nation-took-on-covid-19.

Fradkin, Philip. 1996. A River No More: The Colorado River and the West. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Jenkins, Matt. 2019. “Beyond Drought: The Search for Solutions as Climate Impacts a Legendary River.”
Land Lines. January. https://www.lincolninst.edu/publications/articles/beyond-drought.

McCool, Daniel. 2003. Native Waters: Contemporary Indian Water Settlements and the Second Treaty Era. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press.

USBR (U.S. Bureau of Reclamation). 2012. Colorado River Basin Water Supply and Demand Study. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of the Interior. https://www.usbr.gov/lc/region/programs/crbstudy/finalreport/index.html.

———. 2018. Colorado River Basin Ten Tribes Partnership Tribal Water Study Report. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of the Interior. https://www.usbr.gov/lc/region/programs/crbstudy/tws/finalreport.html.

WTI (Water & Tribes Initiative). 2020. “Toward a Sense of the Basin.” Missoula, MT: University of Montana Center for Natural Resources & Environmental Policy. https://naturalresourcespolicy.org/docs/colorado-river-basin/basin-report-2020.pdf.

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En comunidades de todo el país, este año se ha visto un aumento drástico del uso de parques y espacios abiertos, donde la gente busca un refugio y un respiro de la pandemia de la COVID-19. Las pautas de salud pública recomiendan quedarse cerca de casa, y los residentes urbanos han estado usando los espacios públicos como nunca antes para ejercitar, estar en contacto con la naturaleza, socializar, comer o comprar con distanciamiento social. Han usado el espacio público para acceder a servicios esenciales y realizar protestas y manifestaciones. La pandemia elevó el valor de los parques y los lugares abiertos, y acentuó los beneficios que pueden obtener las ciudades si incrementan el espacio público y crean accesos más equitativos a ellos. También puso de relieve dificultades importantes; por ejemplo, cómo pagar los parques frente a una inminente crisis fiscal.

En muchas ciudades, la pandemia urgió a los dirigentes a implementar soluciones alternativas en vecindarios sin acceso a parques. El éxito de algunos proyectos flexibles, como ampliar las aceras y bicisendas o cerrar calles al tráfico, alentó a las ciudades a seguir pensando de forma creativa para el largo plazo. La COVID también suscitó debates sobre cómo la reinvención del espacio público y la creación de nuevas colaboraciones entre organismos públicos puede ayudar a los dirigentes de las ciudades a acercarse a objetivos urbanos clave, como promover opciones más seguras de movilidad activa, ampliar el acceso a oportunidades en barrios desatendidos, convertir tierras vacantes o infrautilizadas para uso público y desarrollar una mayor resiliencia ante el cambio climático. Por debajo de todo esto, continúa la presión por crear y mantener parques tradicionales, y garantizar el acceso equitativo a ellos.

“La pandemia demostró que los parques son una infraestructura esencial”, dice Adrian Benepe, quien hasta hace poco era vicepresidente sénior y director de programas nacionales en Trust for Public Land (TPL), y fue comisionado de parques en la ciudad de Nueva York entre 2002 y 2012. “Es una gran paradoja que nunca se hayan usado o valorado más que ahora. Todo lo demás se cerró, y los parques fueron un último refugio”.

Incluso antes de la COVID, se había identificado que los parques y el esparcimiento eran una prioridad cada vez mayor en las ciudades de todas las regiones de los Estados Unidos. Según un análisis de 2019 realizado por la Liga Nacional de Ciudades, cerca del 63 por ciento de los alcaldes había esbozado planes u objetivos específicos relacionados con parques y esparcimiento en discursos recientes sobre el “estado de la ciudad”, en comparación con 2017, cuando apenas se llegó al 28 por ciento (Yadavalli 2019).

A medida que la pandemia continúa, muchos dirigentes de ciudades se hacen preguntas clave:

• ¿Qué aprendimos de los parques públicos y los espacios abiertos durante la pandemia?
• ¿Cuáles son las buenas prácticas para ofrecer acceso a los espacios públicos y expandirlos?
• ¿Cómo accedemos a todas las comunidades y escuchamos sus necesidades con relación a los espacios abiertos?
• ¿Cómo podemos cambiar la forma de pensar sobre los recursos espaciales de la ciudad? Y, quizás más importante, ¿dónde encontramos las tierras y los recursos financieros para desarrollar nuevos espacios?

Parques, salud pública y recuperación económica

En todo el país, hasta el 30 por ciento del territorio urbano suele estar ocupado por calles pavimentadas y estacionamientos. En contraste, los parques y los espacios abiertos ocupan apenas el 15 por ciento del suelo urbano. Pero una encuesta nacional que se realizó en mayo para la coalición 10 Minute Walk, que incluye a TPL, el Instituto de Suelo Urbano y la Asociación Nacional de Esparcimiento y Parques (NRPA, por sus siglas en inglés), confirmó el papel crucial que tienen los parques y los espacios verdes locales para mantener la salud física y mental y ayudar a las comunidades en el camino hacia la recuperación. Cerca del 81 por ciento de los 1.000 encuestados dijo que un mejor acceso a parques y espacios verdes locales podría ayudar a la gente a disfrutar del aire libre de forma segura cuando los estados se reabrieran (10 Minute Walk 2020). Dos tercios coincidieron en que los parques fueron importantes para mantener la salud física y mental, que el acceso a los parques locales se hizo más importante durante la crisis, y que su calidad de vida podría mejorar si tuvieran una mayor facilidad para acceder a un parque o un espacio verde cerca de su casa. Los encuestados que viven en ciudades mostraron más propensión a valorar los espacios verdes cercanos.

Estos puntos de datos tienen el respaldo de años de investigaciones que indican que los parques y los espacios abiertos ofrecen muchos “beneficios colaterales” en las áreas urbanas, donde vive el 80 por ciento de la población de los Estados Unidos. Según los estudios, un parque puede reducir el riesgo de estrés, obesidad, problemas respiratorios, cáncer y diabetes. Además, una mayor exposición a espacios verdes se ha asociado a más habilidades cognitivas, menos conductas agresivas y un mayor sentido de comunidad.

“Los datos son claros: los parques y los espacios verdes nos tranquilizan y nos consuelan, nos relajan y nos ayudan a recuperarnos, reducen la ansiedad, la depresión y el estrés”, dice el Dr. Howard Frumkin, médico y epidemiólogo, en Parks and the Pandemic (Parques y la pandemia), un informe especial de TPL (TPL 2020b). Frumkin es profesor emérito en la Facultad de Salud Pública de la Universidad de Washington, y sugirió: “En esta pandemia y en las futuras, queremos combinar el distanciamiento físico y otras medidas de control de contagio con acceso universal a parques y espacios verdes, para ayudar a todas las personas a superar los malos momentos de la forma más segura posible”.

Además de los beneficios relacionados con la salud pública, los parques y espacios abiertos son muy valiosos como impulsores económicos. En una encuesta de la NRPA de 2019, el 85 por ciento de los encuestados dijeron que buscan parques y servicios de esparcimiento de alta calidad cuando eligen un lugar para vivir (NRPA 2019). Un sondeo de la NRPA de marzo de 2020 reveló que el 94 por ciento de los encuestados reconocen la importancia de que los gobiernos inviertan en infraestructura que fomente la actividad económica, como parques y senderos (NRPA 2020).

La cercanía a parques aumenta hasta un 20 por ciento el valor de las propiedades, lo cual a su vez aumenta la renta impositiva local. Además, los parques públicos y los espacios abiertos de buena calidad atraen a nuevas empresas y visitantes a las ciudades. En Detroit, la inauguración del parque Campus Martius, de US$ 19 millones y una hectárea, en 2004, atrajo a nuevas empresas y redesarrollo en el centro. En los últimos años atrajo a más de 2 millones de visitantes al año y ayudó a catalizar más de US$ 1.000 millones en inversiones inmobiliarias alrededor del parque, y se estiman miles de millones más para desarrollo en un proceso que también generará miles de empleos.

Las áreas urbanas también obtienen múltiples beneficios medioambientales de los parques y los espacios verdes. Los árboles absorben la contaminación y ahorran miles de millones de dólares al limpiar el aire; la sombra ayuda a reducir el efecto de isla de calor porque disminuye las temperaturas urbanas. La capacidad de los parques de absorber agua es cada vez más valiosa, no solo en zonas costeras y comunidades ribereñas, sino también para las ciudades que intentan controlar el agua pluvial con infraestructura verde. Como parte del programa Ciudad Verde, Agua Limpia de Filadelfia, que tiene un costo de US$ 4.500 millones y un plazo de 25 años (se trata de una colaboración entre los departamentos de Parques y Esparcimiento y de Agua que pretende capturar el 85 por ciento de la escorrentía de agua pluvial), la ciudad garantizó que incorporará 200 hectáreas de parques y espacios verdes en vecindarios desatendidos. Otras iniciativas locales, como el plan GreenFutures del Distrito Escolar de Filadelfia, la iniciativa Rebuild y el programa Parques para la Gente de TPL, contribuyen a la labor de expandir el acceso a los espacios verdes públicos en la ciudad.

Garantizar el acceso para todos

En los últimos años, las ciudades han explorado nuevas formas de crear más parques urbanos y espacios abiertos, pero “lo que es especial ahora es que la gente al fin se da cuenta de las desigualdades en el acceso a los parques y la necesidad urgente de que haya parques públicos cerca de donde las personas viven”, dice Alyia Gaskins, vicedirectora de programas de salud en el Centro para la Inversión Comunitaria (CCI, por sus siglas en inglés) del Instituto Lincoln de Políticas de Suelo. En el contexto de las recientes manifestaciones y debates sobre raza y racismo, dice: “la gente se está dando cuenta de que las comunidades negras y morenas no solo tienen más riesgo de contagiarse de COVID-19, sino que además suelen estar excluidas de los beneficios a la salud que ofrecen los parques”.

En todo el país, más de 100 millones de personas carecen de acceso seguro y fácil a parques que estén a menos de dos kilómetros de su casa, dice TPL. Ese número representa cerca del 28 por ciento de la población de los Estados Unidos, e incluye a 28 millones de niños. En las 100 ciudades más grandes de la nación, 11,2 millones de personas carecen de un acceso sencillo a estos espacios. La organización dice que, para garantizar que todas las personas de esas ciudades tengan un parque cerca, habría que sumar 8.300 parques a los 23.000 que ya existen.

Incluso si hay parques disponibles, existen desigualdades. Un estudio de TLP publicado en agosto evidenció que, en todo el país, el tamaño de los parques destinados a poblaciones de mayoría no blanca equivale a la mitad del de aquellos destinados a poblaciones de mayoría blanca, y la densidad de población es cinco veces mayor. En promedio, los parques destinados a hogares con mayoría de ingresos bajos tienen un cuarto del tamaño de los destinados a hogares con mayoría de ingresos altos, y la densidad de población es cuatro veces mayor (TPL 2020a).

Durante la pandemia, el modo en que los estados y las ciudades abordan la temática de parques y espacios abiertos ha variado mucho. Algunas ciudades cerraron las riberas y limitaron el acceso a los parques. Otras intentaron gestionar las muchedumbres mediante la implementación de controles, como ingreso cronometrado o letreros de sentido único. En el famoso sendero Katy Trail, en Dallas, en una sola de las entradas se observó un aumento de 22.834 visitantes a principios de marzo a 34.366 a fines de marzo. Los funcionarios instauraron un sistema voluntario que permitía el acceso en días alternados según la primera letra del apellido del visitante. Algunas ciudades prohibieron estacionar en parques atestados, lo cual suscitó cuestionamientos sobre igualdad a favor de las personas que no estaban cerca o no podían ir a pie o en bicicleta.

Para atender la creciente demanda de parques, otras ciudades convirtieron calles en espacios aptos para peatones. Durante los primeros meses del confinamiento, “los parques se convirtieron en el recurso más valioso de la ciudad”, dice J. Nicholas Williams, director del departamento de Parques, Esparcimiento y Desarrollo Joven de Oakland. Para ofrecer espacio de entretenimiento en barrios en que los parques estaban atestados o no existían, en abril Oakland cerró 120 kilómetros de calles a todo el tráfico, salvo vehículos de emergencia y tráfico local. La ciudad se basó en una red de calles que se habían identificado para un plan de bicicletas en 2019, que se había desarrollado con la participación de 3.500 residentes.

El programa Calles Lentas (del cual se replicaron algunas versiones desde Tucson, Arizona, hasta Providence, Rhode Island) fue bien recibido entre muchos residentes de Oakland, pero también recibió críticas porque el enfoque inicial se dio en vecindarios de mayoría blanca. Mediante un trabajo en conjunto con residentes y grupos comunitarios en zonas de mayor diversidad racial y económica, como el este de Oakland, Calles Lentas se expandió a nuevos barrios y se lanzó “Calles Lentas: Lugares Esenciales”, que mejoró la seguridad de los peatones en trayectos hacia servicios esenciales como tiendas de comestibles, sitios de distribución de alimentos y sitios de pruebas de COVID-19.

El programa Calles Lentas continúa, pero Williams dice que Oakland, cuya población creció un 10 por ciento en la última década y llegó a los 433.000 habitantes, se enfrenta a una necesidad mayor: “Oakland sigue creciendo . . . debemos apartar más tierras para parques y mejorar la equidad en el acceso a parques y espacios abiertos”.

Planificación de parques equitativos

“Los parques urbanos son el núcleo de las ciudades resilientes y equitativas”, dice Catherine Nagel, directora ejecutiva de City Parks Alliance (CPA), una organización nacional independiente que ha trabajado con alcaldes para aprovechar más de US$ 190 millones y construir parques urbanos en comunidades desatendidas. “Nuestra investigación muestra algunas formas en que las ciudades pueden aumentar los beneficios en igualdad, salud y medioambiente: identificar nuevas fuentes de financiación, nuevas asociaciones que compartan costos y nuevas [fuentes de] apoyo”.

Las ciudades están financiando parques junto a sectores adyacentes, y recurren a departamentos de agua, vivienda y salud, o se asocian con ellos, para “buscar el respaldo de ámbitos que tradicionalmente no se vinculan con el mundo de los parques”, dice Nagel. Los desarrolladores inmobiliarios están construyendo parques públicos, y las ciudades se están asociando con distritos de mejora comercial y organizaciones sin fines de lucro para asumir las responsabilidades de programación y gestión. “Los parques son más complejos de lo que la gente cree”, dice Nagel. “Requieren trabajos intensivos de programación y mantenimiento, flujos de renta continuos y la capacidad de interactuar con las necesidades comunitarias locales y de los usuarios, y reflejarlas”.

Con el apoyo de la Fundación Robert Wood Johnson, CPA trabajó en iniciativas que analizan la manera en que las ciudades están reasignando dinero para tratar problemas de igualdad, hacen uso de fondos de sectores adyacentes, e innovan para mejorar la igualdad y obtener financiación. Equitable Park Funding Hub, de CPA, es una base de datos interactiva en línea que se lanzará en los próximos meses y presentará oportunidades para financiar parques relacionadas con terrenos abandonados, desarrollo comunitario y de mano de obra, conservación, mitigación del cambio climático e infraestructura verde e hídrica.

En Reclaiming Brownfields (Recuperar terrenos abandonados), la red Groundwork USA comparte ejemplos de proyectos de infraestructura verde y de parques que se centran en la posesión comunitaria y en mejoras en la igualdad en la salud para residentes vitalicios (Groundwork USA 2017). En un proyecto, Groundwork Denver ayudó a visualizar, planificar y obtener los fondos para transformar un terreno abandonado de 2,2 hectáreas en el Espacio Abierto Platte Farm, para el vecindario Globeville, en el norte de Denver. En el barrio latino, rodeado de antiguas plantas industriales y atravesado por vías interestatales, los residentes, en su mayoría de bajos ingresos, lograron que el proyecto restaure praderas nativas de césped corto e instale un jardín polinizador y senderos pavimentados para peatones y bicicletas. Con un subsidio de US$ 550.000 otorgado por el Departamento de Salud Pública y Medioambiente de Colorado, se pagó la construcción y el mantenimiento, que realizarán los departamentos de Parques y Esparcimiento y Transporte e Infraestructura, de la ciudad y el condado de Denver.

El proyecto de Denver es un claro ejemplo de cómo las ciudades pueden reconcebir los recursos actuales. Si bien casi ninguna tiene grandes trayectos de suelo vacante, dice Benepe, de TPL, podrían usar la creatividad para modernizar terrenos o sitios industriales abandonados, vertederos sanitarios o vados de tren o de servicios públicos en proyectos de alto perfil, como demostraron serlo High Line, en Nueva York, o el parque Millennium, en Chicago. Benepe dice que todas las ciudades deberían analizar la igualdad en sus sistemas de parques e identificar potenciales sitios para parques y espacios abiertos en barrios desatendidos.

Gaskins, del CCI, dice que el primer paso para planificar un parque equitativo es “conversar con las comunidades para conocer su visión de lo que esperan para estos espacios, ya sea la construcción de parques nuevos o el rediseño de los que ya existen”. Dice que la cercanía y el acceso son importantes, pero “también hay que considerar la calidad del parque y si la gente se siente bienvenida y segura”, tanto en el parque como en el camino para llegar a él.

Gaskins dice que, en particular en vecindarios afectados por el aburguesamiento, los residentes vitalicios suelen sentir que los servicios que se introducen con los nuevos desarrollos, como los parques, no están hechos para ellos. Para las iniciativas nuevas, los planificadores y otros funcionarios de las ciudades deberían procurar que exista un proceso sólido que involucre a la comunidad. “Los parques son más que infraestructura”, dice. “Ofrecen acceso a programas y servicios, espacios de reunión y oportunidades de empleo que también son importantes para fomentar la igualdad en la salud”.

Pagar los parques en tiempos de austeridad

Luego del colapso financiero de 2008, los presupuestos para parques fueron de los primeros en sufrir recortes y de los últimos puntos presupuestarios municipales en recuperarse. Entre 2009 y 2013, el gasto en parques cayó un 21,2 por ciento, dice la NRPA; y para 2013, los parques y el esparcimiento conformaban apenas el 1,9 por ciento de los gastos gubernamentales locales. En muchas ciudades grandes, el mantenimiento diferido de parques se calculó en miles de millones de dólares.

¿Los presupuestos de parques sufrirán el mismo destino en la era de la COVID? Una encuesta de la NRPA realizada a fines de junio a más de 400 dirigentes de parques y esparcimiento demostró que dos tercios de los organismos debieron reducir el gasto operativo del año fiscal entre un 10 y un 20 por ciento a partir del 1 de julio, y el 57 por ciento se enfrentaba a una disminución de entre el 50 y el 59 por ciento en la mediana de inversión en bienes de capital. Una de cada cinco de las personas encuestadas informó que su presupuesto de capital se había eliminado por completo (Roth 2020).

Los defensores de los parques advierten que los sistemas de parques de las ciudades llegaron a un punto de inflexión crítico: el uso intensivo y los recortes de presupuesto relacionados con la COVID presentan un riesgo de daños irreversibles en 2020 y en el futuro. Algunas personas dicen que es fundamental priorizar la financiación del mantenimiento, para garantizar que los parques y los espacios libres sean seguros y atractivos y se usen, mientras que otras dicen que las inversiones en nuevos proyectos capitales podrían ayudar más a estimular la economía para recuperarse de la COVID.

Rachel Banner, directora de acceso a parques de la NRPA, destaca que, probablemente, los presupuestos para parques, que dependen más de impuestos a la propiedad inmobiliaria, que se mantuvieron estables durante la pandemia, estén en mejor forma que aquellos que dependen, en su mayor parte, de la renta por impuestos a las ventas. “Es importante que haya diversidad en los flujos de renta”, dice Banner. “Hay que pensar en qué es lo mejor para adquirir capacidad de resistencia en una recesión económica, como recurrir a una variedad de fuentes”.

Una estrategia que según la NRPA tiene buenos resultados es asignar una proporción estándar de los fondos generales a parques y espacios abiertos, “en particular hoy, que son totalmente esenciales”. Banner dice que, para abordar la igualdad de parques en el presupuesto de capital, algunas ciudades usan criterios de priorización relacionados con factores como la calidad de los espacios parquizados, la antigüedad del equipo, el cumplimiento de la Ley sobre Estadounidenses con Discapacidades (ADA) y los datos demográficos del barrio, como ingresos, raza, resultados en salud y posesión de vehículos.

En muchas ciudades y condados, algunas campañas de impuestos exclusivos lograron obtener una porción importante de los fondos para parques y espacios abiertos. En marzo, los votantes de Oakland aprobaron Ballot Measure Q para crear un impuesto a 20 años, de cuya renta el 64 por ciento se destinará a parques, mantenimiento de paisajes y servicios recreativos, a partir del año fiscal 2020–2021. El triunfo de Measure Q demostró que los residentes de la ciudad “cambiaron la forma de reconocer el valor de los parques y los espacios abiertos”, dice Williams, director de parques de Oakland. Si bien Measure Q no ofrece financiamiento para espacios nuevos, dice, sí aborda la igualdad porque brinda fondos para mantener y programar parques comunitarios e individuales más pequeños. Según Williams, se estima que la medida obtendrá US$ 13,4 millones para los parques en el año fiscal 2020–2021, cifra que no se modificó con la revisión de presupuesto de mitad de ciclo en la ciudad que se realizó en los últimos meses, pero se seguirá evaluando.

Otra iniciativa definida por plebiscito que tuvo buenos resultados fue Measure 2A, en Denver, aprobada en 2018 y conocida como Parks Legacy Fund. Entre 2012 y 2017, la población de la ciudad creció un 11 por ciento, pero el espacio parquizado creció solo un 5 por ciento; además, los fondos para el mantenimiento de los parques de la ciudad, por el valor de US$ 130 millones, se aplazaron. En combinación con los fondos generales, se estimó que Parks Legacy Fund producirá US$ 37,5 millones al año para renovar parques, adquirir tierras y construir parques, senderos y espacios abiertos nuevos, priorizando a las comunidades más necesitadas. La ciudad pretende revisar el presupuesto para reflejar los impactos relacionados con la COVID en los próximos meses.

El año pasado, una medida definida por plebiscito en Nueva Orleans generó cientos de millones de dólares para parques en un lapso de 20 años, que priorizará zonas de bajos ingresos, según indica Bill Lee, vicepresidente sénior de políticas, defensa y relaciones gubernamentales de TPL. A pesar del impacto de la COVID en las economías locales, Lee es optimista sobre otras propuestas de financiación relacionadas con plebiscitos: “Más de tres cuartas partes de estas medidas se aprueban en momentos económicos buenos y malos, en estados de mayoría republicana y demócrata, porque la gente ve el valor de los parques y los espacios abiertos”.

La ciudad de Oklahoma da fe de esto. En noviembre de 2019, la ciudad abrió una sección de 14,5 hectáreas del parque Scissortail, en el núcleo de la ciudad, ubicada en tierras donde antes había edificios abandonados y basureros. Esta primera etapa del proyecto de US$ 132 millones incluye servicios como un parque de juegos, fuentes interactivas, una pista de patinaje, un café, un escenario, un lago con espacio para barcos y botes de alquiler, jardines demostrativos, un mercado de productos rurales, césped y ramblas, y casi 1.000 árboles.

El parque Scissortail está cerca del nuevo centro de convenciones de la ciudad y de la biblioteca, el estadio, la cancha de béisbol y el tranvía del centro; todos estos proyectos recibieron fondos del impuesto Proyectos del Área Metropolitana (MAPS), un impuesto a la venta en oferta aprobado por los votantes y creado en 1993 para pagar sin financiamiento proyectos de revitalización del centro y mejora de la calidad de vida de la ciudad. El parque es fruto de una asociación entre el sector público y el privado, y también recibió millones de dólares en donaciones. Además, obtiene ingresos por eventos y alquiler de equipos, patrocinios, concesionarios de alimentos y bebidas, membresías y subsidios. Luego de diez años de planificación y construcción, para 2022 incluirá 13,7 hectáreas más, que se extenderán hasta el río Oklahoma, con campos deportivos y zonas naturales, a los que se podrá acceder por un puente que cruzará la interestatal 40.

El parque Scissortail recibió una asignación fundamental en la tercera vuelta de fondos de MAPS; en diciembre de 2019, los votantes aprobaron una cuarta vuelta de MAPS, de la cual US$ 140 millones se destinarán a la transformación del barrio de la ciudad, parques comunitarios e instalaciones deportivas. Esto forma parte de una medida definida por plebiscito para barrios y servicios humanos, por US$ 978 millones.

“Scissortail es nuestro espacio común cultural en el centro”, dijo Maureen Heffernan, directora ejecutiva y presidenta de la Fundación Scissortail Park, que gestiona el parque y lo mantuvo abierto durante la pandemia con eventos y programas limitados. Muchas personas expresaron su gratitud por el parque Scissortail y los jardines botánicos Myriad de la ciudad, que están cerca y que también gestiona Heffernan. “En los últimos meses, y más que nunca, los espacios verdes bien mantenidos de zonas urbanas han sido un recurso esencial para que la gente disfrute y se relaje”, dice. Los parques urbanos “son algo que todos quieren y quieren financiar, y son transformadores”, destaca Heffernan, y añade que a la ciudad de Oklahoma “en general no le gusta aumentar los impuestos, pero los residentes aprobaron el MAPS porque estos proyectos palpables marcan una diferencia drástica en la calidad de vida de la gente de aquí”.

Los defensores del parque también acuden a la legislación federal para obtener financiación. La Ley de Espacios Abiertos, que entró en vigencia en agosto, incluye financiación permanente de costos de petróleo y gas de otros países para el Fondo de Conservación de Tierras y Agua (LWCF, por sus siglas en inglés), lo cual pone a disposición US$ 900 millones al año para tierras públicas, como parques y senderos urbanos. El programa Outdoor Recreation Legacy Partnership (ORLP) del LWCF es una fuente de subsidios anuales para zonas urbanas con más de 50.000 residentes; el año pasado, otorgó subsidios por US$ 25 millones, que variaron entre US$ 300.000 y US$ 1 millón, y se priorizaron proyectos en zonas de bajos ingresos sin oportunidades de esparcimiento al aire libre.

Los defensores de parques también tienen el ojo puesto en potenciales fondos federales de estímulo. En mayo, 100 organizaciones, entre ellas TPL, CPA, la NRPA, la Asociación Estadounidense de Planificación y la Conferencia de Alcaldes de los Estados Unidos le pidieron al Congreso que incluya US$ 500 millones para empleos relacionados con la construcción o la renovación de parques en zonas urbanas de bajos ingresos, como parte de un futuro paquete de estímulo ante el coronavirus.

Asociaciones públicas y privadas

En algunos casos, las colaboraciones con organizaciones sin fines de lucro posibilitan la creación de parques. Western Reserve Land Conservancy (WRLC), una organización sin fines de lucro con base en Cleveland, conservó más de 24.000 hectáreas y creó más de 155 parques y reservas en la región desde fines de la década de 1990. WRLC recaudó más de US$ 400 millones para ayudar a bancos de tierras a demoler 40.000 propiedades abandonadas o vacantes en todo Ohio, y protegió tierras para comunidades de bajos ingresos hasta que se puedan convertir en parques, espacios verdes o sitios para viviendas asequibles y otros destinos.

Mediante su programa Reforestar nuestra Ciudad, plantó más de 10.000 árboles en Cleveland; compró un basural en un sitio junto al zoológico, limpió la contaminación y desarrolló el parque Brighton, de 10 hectáreas, que posee un sendero para peatones y bicicletas. El parque de US$ 1 millón se encuentra en una zona de alta densidad, y la inauguración se programó para octubre. El año que viene, se plantarán 1.000 árboles, y la gestión estará a cargo de Metroparks District, según indica Jim Rokakis, vicepresidente de WRLC y coautor de The Land Bank Revolution (La revolución de los bancos de tierras, Rokakis 2020). Además, WRLC está creando seis parques en el barrio Mount Pleasant de Cleveland, que serán de su propiedad o estarán bajo su gestión.

Otras ciudades dependen de empresas y apoyo filantrópico para financiar parques. Cerca del 90 por ciento del costo de US$ 19 millones del parque Campus Martius de Detroit y la infraestructura circundante fue financiado por corporaciones y fundaciones de la ciudad. La gestión del parque, que pertenece a la ciudad, está a cargo de Downtown Detroit Partnership. El Sendero Cultural de Indianápolis, un sendero para peatones y bicicletas de casi 13 kilómetros que conecta ocho distritos culturales en el centro de Indianápolis, se someterá a una expansión por el valor de US$ 30 millones, de los cuales US$ 20 millones son de Lilly Endowment, Inc., US$ 5 millones de la ciudad y US$ 1 millón de la Fundación Anthem.

Además, las ciudades se están asociando con desarrolladores privados para construir y operar nuevos parques y espacios abiertos. Desde 1993, la zonificación de la ribera en la ciudad de Nueva York exige a los desarrolladores que ofrezcan acceso público a esta. Esta zonificación provocó el redesarrollo de sitios industriales para convertirlos en diversos parques, que permiten el acceso público y aportan a la resiliencia ante el cambio climático.

El parque Domino, en East River, Brooklyn, de 2,4 hectáreas, se inauguró en 2018 y es parte de un sitio de 4,4 hectáreas que incluirá una adaptación para reutilizar la histórica refinería Domino Sugar, y 30 hectáreas de desarrollos de uso mixto, con 2.200 unidades de vivienda, de las cuales 700 serán asequibles. El desarrollador Two Trees Management, con base en Brooklyn, que invirtió US$ 50 millones para construir el parque y destina US$ 2 millones al año para su funcionamiento, trabajó en conjunto con la comunidad para identificar necesidades, como una calle de rápido acceso para que el parque se considere público de verdad. El parque, diseñado por James Corner Field Operations, incluye un malecón junto al río, instalaciones de esparcimiento, fuentes interactivas, un paseo de cinco cuadras con maquinaria fabril rescatada y 175 árboles. Ofrece acceso público a la ribera por primera vez en 160 años.

Otra opción prometedora de financiamiento es la devolución de valor territorial, un mecanismo mediante el cual las ciudades recuperan los aumentos en el valor de las propiedades ocasionados por la rezonificación o por las inversiones en infraestructura. Esta herramienta se conoce también como captura de valor territorial, y “será una manera efectiva de que las ciudades conviertan espacios infrautilizados en parques y espacios abiertos”, dice Enrique Silva, director de iniciativas internacionales del Instituto Lincoln.

Silva dice que las ciudades pueden recuperar aumentos de valor territorial relacionados con la zonificación para hacerse de tierras y pagar el desarrollo de parques. Además, pueden recuperar el valor mediante tasaciones más elevadas en el impuesto a la propiedad inmobiliaria, que generan una renta impositiva municipal mayor. Indica que los sitios vacantes que pertenecen a las ciudades y están destinados a edificios que, por ahora, estas no pueden construir también pueden convertirse en parques temporales o permanentes, y pueden generar nuevas oportunidades de captura de valor territorial. Algunas herramientas de planificación municipal, como tasaciones especiales y derechos de desarrollo transferibles, también pueden ayudar a financiar parques, espacios abiertos y mejoras en la infraestructura.

Los parques y los espacios abiertos pueden aumentar el valor en forma de resiliencia ante el cambio climático, y ahora, con la COVID, se considerarán un valor social agregado, dice Silva. “La sensación de que vale la pena invertir en parques y espacios abiertos como infraestructura pública es cada vez más fuerte. Este tipo de inversión adquirirá mayor relevancia a medida que se necesiten más espacios públicos”, dice Silva. “En la medida en que la COVID está obligando a todas las personas a reconsiderar el espacio público, y los lugares abiertos en las ciudades se valorizan cada vez más”, dice, ciertos pasos, como convertir calles para uso peatonal y establecer nuevos parques y espacios al aire libre, marcaran “el nuevo camino de la planificación”.

Encuesta sobre la pandemia y el espacio público

Una encuesta global realizada por Gehl, la empresa de diseño y planificación con base en Copenhague que rediseñó Times Square para peatones y ciclistas en la ciudad de Nueva York, revela la importancia del espacio público durante la pandemia. Se encuestó a cerca de 2.000 personas de 40 estados de los Estados Unidos, 68 países y casi todos los continentes, de las cuales unos dos tercios habitan en zonas urbanas. Las siguientes son algunas de las visiones que compartieron acerca del espacio público en sus vidas diarias:

• El 66 por ciento usa espacios públicos cercanos al menos una vez al día, y el 16 por ciento los usa varias veces al día.
• Algunos de los destinos del espacio público que más citaron son las calles y las aceras del barrio (87 por ciento), lugares esenciales como tiendas de comestibles (72 por ciento), parques del barrio (67 por ciento) y escaleras, patios o jardines (59 por ciento).
• Dos tercios informaron que caminan más durante la pandemia; entre los propietarios de autos, la cifra fue del 69 por ciento.

Estas son algunas sugerencias de Gehl para mejorar el acceso y reducir la aglomeración de gente en parques y espacios abiertos:

• Redistribuir los espacios para que se pueda caminar y andar en bicicleta y patines con mayor distanciamiento físico, mediante extensiones de las aceras, cierre de carriles de estacionamiento o cierre de calles en una cuadra o en varias cuadras.
• Priorizar las medidas de redistribución de espacios en vecindarios sin acceso a pie (en menos de 15 minutos) a parques y servicios esenciales.
• Expandir la cantidad de entradas o designar puertas exclusivas de entrada o salida para gestionar el flujo a los espacios públicos más congestionados.
• Para apoyar a personas mayores y otras poblaciones vulnerables, procurar que los espacios públicos nuevos ofrezcan la posibilidad de sentarse a distancia segura y no solo de pasar por allí.

Fuente: Gehl (https://gehlpeople.com/blog/public-space-plays-vital-role-in-pandemic).

Kathleen McCormick, directora de Fountainhead Communications en Boulder, Colorado, escribe con frecuencia sobre comunidades saludables, sostenibles y con capacidad de recuperación.

Referencias

10 Minute Walk. n.d. “Our Research.” https://10minutewalk.org/#Our-research.

Groundwork USA. 2017. Reclaiming Brownfields: Highlights from the Groundwork USA Network.Yonkers, NY: Groundwork USA. https://groundworkusa.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/GWUSA-Brownfields-Highlights-2017.pdf.

NRPA (Asociación Nacional de Esparcimiento y Parques). 2020. The Economic Impact of Parks: An Examination of the Economic Impacts of Operations and Capital Spending by Local Park and Recreation Agencies on the U.S. Economy. Ashburn, VA: Asociación Nacional de Esparcimiento y Parques. https://www.nrpa.org/siteassets/research/economic-impact-study-summary-2020.pdf.

———. 2019. 2019 Engagement with Parks Report. Ashburn, VA: Asociación Nacional de Esparcimiento y Parques. Septiembre. https://www.nrpa.org/globalassets/engagement-survey-report-2019.pdf.

Rokakis, James, y Gus Frangos. 2020. The Land Bank Revolution: How Ohio’s Communities Fought Back Against the Foreclosure Crisis. Cleveland, Ohio: Parafine Press.

Roth, Kevin. 2020. “NRPA Parks Snapshot: June 24–26 Survey Results.” Open Space (blog), Asociación Nacional de Esparcimiento y Parques. 26 de junio. https://www.nrpa.org/blog/nrpa-parks-snapshot-june-24-26-survey-results/.

TPL (Trust for Public Land). 2020a. The Heat Is On: With Temperatures Rising and Quality Parks Too Few and Far Between, Communities of Color Face a Dangerous Disparity. San Francisco, CA: Trust for Public Land. https://www.tpl.org/sites/default/files/The-Heat-is-on_A-Trust-for-Public-Land_special-report.pdf.

———. 2020b. Parks and the Pandemic: A Trust for Public Land Special Report. San Francisco, CA: Trust for Public Land. https://www.tpl.org/parks-and-the-pandemic.

Yadavalli, Anita, Rose Kim, Christiana K. McFarland y Brooks Rainwater. 2019. State of the Cities 2019. Washington, DC: Liga Nacional de Ciudades. https://www.nlc.org/resource/state-of-the-cities-2019.

The Lincoln Institute of Land Policy today launched a new enterprise to expand the use of advanced technology for land and water conservation—The Center for Geospatial Solutions (CGS). The center will give people and organizations the tools they need to manage land and water resources with precision, at the scale required to confront pressing challenges such as climate change, loss of habitat, and water scarcity.

The center will provide data, conduct analysis, and perform specialized consulting services that enable organizations of all sizes in the nonprofit, public, and private sectors to deploy geographic information systems (GIS), remote sensing, and other geospatial technologies. The center will help practitioners to overcome barriers such as a lack of staffing, resources, or expertise, which have hindered the adoption of geospatial technology, especially in the nonprofit sector.

“If land and water managers, conservationists, and governments are to meet rapidly accelerating social, economic, and environmental challenges, including climate change, they need to work together at larger scales and make use of every possible tool,” said Anne Scott, executive director for the Center for Geospatial Solutions. “The Center for Geospatial Solutions will enhance collective access to better data and analysis, so that practitioners and decisionmakers can act collaboratively on the best information available.”

The center will deliver services directly to nonprofit organizations, foundations, governments, and businesses, and will also work with funders to guide and administer grants. The center will also use the resources and expertise of the Lincoln Institute, which is organized around the achievement of six goals: sustainably managed land and water resources, low-carbon, climate-resilient communities and regions, efficient and equitable tax systems, reduced poverty and spatial inequality, fiscally healthy communities and regions, and functional land markets and reduced informality.

“My wife, Laura, and I developed Esri to help people make better decisions for our world, and that is what the Center for Geospatial Solutions is accomplishing,” said Jack Dangermond, President and CEO of Environmental Systems Research Institute (Esri). “The Center for Geospatial Solutions will move the global environmental field over the next decade to meet goals set forth by scientists to save and restore our planet. The center’s combination of partnerships, shared resources, advanced data science and analysis fills an important niche to bring geospatial technology solutions to environmental organizations worldwide.”

The center will prioritize access to technology for people and communities that have been historically marginalized, governments in the developing world, under-resourced nonprofit organizations, startups, and businesses operating in developing or restricted economies. The center will build customized tools that can be tailored to fit the size and capacity of any organization.

“These are unprecedented times, which require broad vision combined with the practical implementation of innovative solutions,” said Breece Robertson, director of partnerships and strategy for the Center for Geospatial Solutions. “We can’t address global challenges like climate change and inequity without access to data, science and technologies that enable everyone to act effectively.”

The potential for geospatial technology to improve conservation is well demonstrated. In one powerful application, regional planners in Tucson, Arizona, worked with nonprofit partners, including the Lincoln Institute’s Babbitt Center for Land and Water Policy, to map the tree canopy, surface temperatures, and other data to help communities to better-manage stormwater, and to prioritize where to plant trees. In another case, Denver’s regional planning agency is using high-resolution maps to classify land cover into eight categories for a wide range of possible uses, including to understand habitat connectivity and quality to guide investment in green infrastructure.

In addition to advancing land and water conservation, geospatial technology can inform decisions in urban contexts. Its applications include analyzing cities’ carbon footprints, exploring the conservation potential of brownfield sites, revealing local variations in air quality, and mapping parks, open spaces, and urban corridors for wildlife.

“Some organizations are already using geospatial technology to understand what is happening on the ground with greater and greater precision,” said Jeffrey Allenby, director of geospatial technology for the Center for Geospatial Solutions. “The center will bring this capability to organizations of all sizes and scales by building customized tools that are easy to use for all staff, even those with no background or training in technology.”

“The center builds on the Lincoln Institute’s long track record of pioneering ideas that have transformed land policy,” Lincoln Institute President and CEO George W. “Mac” McCarthy wrote in an essay in Land Lines, the magazine of the Lincoln Institute. “The Center for Geospatial Solutions represents another transformational idea—by making land, water, and mapping technology universal, we can enable people and organizations to collaborate and achieve impact that is orders-of-magnitude greater than what they can accomplish today. Like lifting a fog, applying geospatial technology will enable anyone to see what is happening anywhere on the Earth. It will make the planet feel that much smaller, and the solutions to humanity’s toughest problems that much easier to grasp.”

For more information, visit cgs.earth or email cgs@lincolninst.edu.

Leadership of the Center for Geospatial Solutions

Anne Scott, Executive Director

Anne brings leadership experience in public and community health and international development, and she is particularly passionate about achieving cost-effective outcomes that can be replicated and scaled. She has lived and worked in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East on the implementation and evaluation of large-scale health and environmental programs funded by the U.S. and European governments, and philanthropic foundations. Anne has held executive positions at the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation in London, the Charlottesville (Virginia) Area Community Foundation and, most recently, Boston-based Pathfinder International. She is a prior board chair of the Chesapeake Conservancy. Anne has a Ph.D. in medical anthropology and an MBA in finance, as well as post-doctoral qualifications in science and diplomacy, and health and child survival.

Jeffrey Allenby, Director of Geospatial Technology.

Jeff brings a wealth of experience developing systems-focused solutions at the intersection of technology and the natural world. Prior to joining the Lincoln Institute, Jeff was the director of conservation technology at the Chesapeake Conservancy and cofounder of the Conservancy’s Conservation Innovation Center, building it from scratch into a globally recognized pioneer in the application of technology to improve environmental decision making in the Chesapeake Bay and across the world. Jeff worked previously for the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science and the Maryland Department of Natural Resources on projects to support local climate change adaptation. Jeff has a M.E.M. and a certificate in geospatial analysis from Duke University and a B.S. from the University of Richmond. Jeff also serves as a member of the advisory board for the Internet of Water.

Breece Robertson, Director of Partnerships and Strategy

Breece has more than 18 years of experience leading collaborative and strategic initiatives that leverage data-driven platforms, GIS, research, and planning for the park and conservation fields. Breece combines geospatial technology and storytelling to inspire, activate, educate, and engage. During her career at The Trust for Public Land, she led geospatial innovations that supported the protection of 3,000+ places, over 2+ million acres of land, provided park access to over 9 million people, and achieved $74 billion in voter-approved funding for parks and conservation. She is a skilled leader, collaborator, implementer, and creative visionary with a legacy of building award-winning teams and community-driven GIS approaches for strategic conservation and park creation. Esri, the world’s leader in geographic information system (GIS) technology, twice has honored Robertson for innovation in helping communities meet park and conservation goals. In 2006, she was awarded the Esri Special Achievement in GIS award and in 2012, the “Making a Difference” award – a prestigious presidential award.

About the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy

The Lincoln Institute of Land Policy seeks to improve quality of life through the effective use, taxation, and stewardship of land. A nonprofit private operating foundation whose origins date to 1946, the Lincoln Institute researches and recommends creative approaches to land as a solution to economic, social, and environmental challenges. Through education, training, publications, and events, we integrate theory and practice to inform public policy decisions worldwide.

Will Jason is director of communications at the Lincoln Institute.

Image: NOAA Data Enterprise (NDE) VIIRS daily global active fire detections, UMD Geographical Sciences VIIRS Active Fire site, http://viirsfire.geog.umd.edu/pages/mapsData.php.

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The onset of the pandemic led the International Land Conservation Network (ILCN) to recast plans for a global conservation congress earlier this year, shifting from an in-person gathering for 300 people in Barcelona to a series of virtual webinars. Like many organizations, ILCN saw a surprising benefit emerge from this unexpected change of plans: its webinar series received more than 1,100 registrations from conservation practitioners in 83 countries, and targeted sharing of series recordings in countries including China has expanded that reach into the thousands.

That experience led ILCN to recognize an opportunity: combining targeted, regional outreach with the global reach enabled by virtual tools and strategies could help strengthen engagement throughout the land conservation community. This fall, the organization appointed regional representatives on six continents. “By bringing on this core group of experienced regional representatives, we’re hoping to encourage a more robust exchange of expertise and ideas,” said Chandni Navalkha, program manager for Land Conservation at the Lincoln Institute.

The newly appointed representatives will utilize their deep experience in private and civic land conservation to build upon existing relationships in each region — through meetings and conversations held in person or virtually as the evolving global context allows — and forge new connections with leading practitioners and experts. They will bring their expertise to the broader ILCN community through webinars, newsletter articles, and other channels and, in turn, share resources, news, and strategies related to private and civic land conservation in other geographies with key stakeholders in the region they are representing. In China, for example, regional representative Shenmin Liu will join the steering committee of the China Civic Land Conservation Alliance (CCLCA), where she will share the evolving strategies and policies through which civic conservation efforts will be included in the planning for a new Chinese national park system.

“We are honored to have recruited such a diverse and accomplished group of conservationists to serve as our regional ambassadors,” noted Jim Levitt, director of the ILCN. In early October, Levitt hosted a virtual meet and greet that provided a forum for the representatives to introduce themselves to each other and to members of the ILCN network from around the world. The representatives each spoke for a few minutes about their work, as well as the challenges and opportunities ahead:

• Europe: Tilmann Disselhoff. Disselhoff manages the European Land Conservation Network (ELCN), an EU-wide network of organizations active in private land conservation that “wouldn’t have been possible without the help of ILCN,” he said. Disselhoff spoke about the power of collaboration and about plans for expanding the work of ELCN.
• Australasia: Cecilia Riebl. A policy advisor for Australia’s Trust for Nature, Riebl spoke about obstacles and progress in the region: “This sector has a profound and compelling cause: it is absolutely critical to addressing the global biodiversity crisis, and increasingly will need to do this in dynamic ways, by introducing new actors to conservation and finding creative ways to finance it.”
• Latin America: Hernan Mladinic. Mladinic, of Chile, has worked in conservation for more than 30 years and recently concluded a 10-year stint as executive director of Tompkins Conservation, which promotes landscape-scale conservation in South America. In the context of COVID and climate change, Mladinic said, “conservation will have to strategically link social, environmental, and economic issues.”
• Asia: Shenmin Liu. A research analyst at the Lincoln Institute who grew up in Beijing, Liu described China’s conservation efforts and the tension between conservation and economic growth in developing countries in Asia. Liu sees a “huge need for multidirectional knowledge exchange” and will work with regional NGOs ahead of the meeting of the Conference of the Parties (COP-15) of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD)in Kunming, China, in May 2021.
• North America: Shawn Johnson. As managing director of the Center for Natural Resources and Environmental Policy at the University of Montana, Johnson was instrumental in helping to launch the Lincoln Institute’s Large Landscape Peer Learning Initiative. “We think about land conservation as something we do on the side,” he said. “But conservation is critical to the health and well being of our society . . . how do we create the connections that will help us heal as we move forward?”
• Africa: Kiragu Mwangi. Mwangi, a senior capacity development manager for BirdLife International who is currently based in the United Kingdom, grew up in Kenya and says stronger collaboration is needed between land conservation groups in Africa and elsewhere. “Partnerships are made even more rich when we collaborate and partner with people from different backgrounds,” he said, “for it is in diversity that we draw on the great wealth of knowledge and experiences to help achieve greater impacts with our work.”

Citing the urgency of advancing innovation in land conservation in light of the upcoming Convention on Biological Diversity COP-15 meeting in China, as well as the growing momentum behind the global campaign to protect 30 percent of the earth’s surface by 2030 (30×30), Levitt said the virtual gathering, and the promise of an increasingly connected and collaborative approach to conservation, gave him hope. “It’s not only humbling to be in this group, I hope it’s also emboldening,” Levitt said at the conclusion of the meet and greet. “To know there is a group of people all over the world with the courage and strength and intelligence to prepare a world our great-grandchildren can enjoy . . . . The more connections we make now, the more connections we will make going forward.”

Katharine Wroth is the editor of Land Lines.

Photograph: Aerial View over Okavango Delta in Botswana. Credit: Gfed/Getty Images Plus.

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In communities across the country, parks and open space have seen dramatic increases in use this year as people sought refuge and respite from the COVID-19 pandemic. With public health guidelines recommending staying close to home, urban residents have been using public spaces in unprecedented numbers as places to exercise, be closer to nature, and socialize, dine, or shop at social distances. They have used public spaces to access essential services and to hold protests and demonstrations. The pandemic has elevated the value of parks and open space and has underscored the benefits for cities of creating more public spaces and more equitable access to them. It also has highlighted significant challenges, including how to pay for parks in the face of a looming fiscal crisis.

In many cities, the pandemic prompted city leaders to implement workarounds in neighborhoods without access to parks. The success of adaptive projects like widening sidewalks and bike lanes or closing streets to traffic has encouraged cities to continue to think creatively for the long term. COVID has also prompted discussions about how reimagining public space and creating new collaborations between public agencies could help city leaders make progress toward key urban goals, such as encouraging safer active-mobility options, expanding access to opportunity in underserved neighborhoods, converting vacant or underused land for public use, and developing greater climate resilience. Underlying all of this, the push for creating and maintaining traditional parks—and ensuring equitable access to them—continues.

“The pandemic has proven that parks are essential infrastructure,” says Adrian Benepe, who served until this fall as senior vice president and director of national programs for the Trust for Public Land (TPL) and was parks commissioner for the city of New York from 2002 to 2012. “It’s a great paradox that parks have never been more used or appreciated than now. Everything else was shut down, and parks were a last refuge.”

Even before COVID, parks and recreation had been identified as a growing priority for cities in every region of the United States. According to a 2019 analysis conducted by the National League of Cities, some 63 percent of mayors had outlined specific plans or goals related to parks and recreation in recent “state of the city” speeches, compared to just 28 percent in 2017 (Yadavalli 2019).

As the pandemic continues, many city leaders are asking themselves key questions:

• What have we learned about public parks and open space during the pandemic?

• What are the best practices for providing access to and expansion of public spaces?

• How do we reach out and listen to all communities about their open space needs?

• How can we think differently about our city’s spatial assets, and—perhaps most important—where do we find the land and financial resources to develop new ones?

Parks, Public Health, and Economic Recovery

Across the country, up to 30 percent of urban land typically is occupied by paved streets and parking lots. Parks and open space, by contrast, occupy only 15 percent of urban land. But a national survey conducted in May for the 10 Minute Walk coalition, which includes TPL, the Urban Land Institute, and the National Recreation and Park Association (NRPA), confirmed the crucial role of local parks and green spaces in maintaining physical and mental health and helping communities navigate toward recovery. Some 81 percent of the 1,000 survey respondents said increasing access to local parks and green spaces would help people enjoy the outdoors safely as states reopened (10 Minute Walk 2020). Two-thirds agreed that parks were important in maintaining physical and mental health, that access to local parks had become more important during the crisis, and that their quality of life would improve with better access to a park or green space near home. Urban respondents were most likely to value nearby green space.

These data points are backed up by years of research indicating that parks and open space provide many “cobenefits” for urban areas, where 80 percent of the U.S. population lives. Studies show that park use can lower the risk of stress, obesity, respiratory problems, cancer, and diabetes. Increased exposure to green space has also been linked to higher cognitive abilities, reductions in aggressive behaviors, and a stronger sense of community.

“The data are clear: Parks and green space soothe and console us, relax and restore us, reduce our anxiety, depression, and stress,” says physician and epidemiologist Dr. Howard Frumkin in Parks and the Pandemic, a TPL special report (TPL 2020b). Frumkin, a professor emeritus at the University of Washington School of Public Health, advised: “In this and in future pandemics, we’ll want to combine physical distancing and other infection-control measures with universal access to parks and green space, to help everyone get through hard times as safely as possible.”

In addition to public health benefits, parks and open space are highly valued as economic drivers. In a 2019 NRPA survey, 85 percent of respondents said they seek high-quality parks and recreation amenities when choosing a place to live (NRPA 2019). A March 2020 NRPA poll revealed that 94 percent of respondents recognize the importance of governments investing in infrastructure that promotes economic activity, including parks and trails (NRPA 2020). Proximity to parks increases property values as much as 20 percent, which in turn increases local tax revenues. High-quality public parks and open space also draw new businesses and visitors to cities. In Detroit, the $19 million, 2.5-acre Campus Martius Park helped attract new companies and redevelopment to downtown after it opened in 2004. In recent years, it has attracted over 2 million visitors annually and has helped catalyze more than $1 billion in real estate investments around the park, with billions more development dollars projected in a pipeline that would also lead to thousands of jobs.

Urban areas also derive multiple environmental benefits from parks and green space. Trees absorb pollution, producing billions of dollars in savings from cleaner air; their shade helps reduce the heat island effect by lowering urban temperatures. The ability of parks to absorb water is increasingly valuable, not just in coastal areas and riverfront communities, but also in cities seeking to control stormwater through green infrastructure. As part of Philadelphia’s $4.5 billion, 25-year Green City, Clean Waters program—a collaboration between the Parks and Recreation and Water departments that aims to capture 85 percent of the city’s stormwater runoff—the city pledged to add 500 acres of parks and green spaces in underserved neighborhoods.

Other local initiatives, including the School District of Philadelphia’s GreenFutures plan, the Rebuild Initiative, and TPL’s Parks for People Program, are contributing to the effort to expand access to public green space in the city.

Ensuring Access for All

In recent years, cities have been exploring ways to create more urban parks and open space, but “what’s unique at this moment is people are finally noticing inequities in park access and the urgent need for public parks close to where people live,” says Alyia Gaskins, assistant director of health programs for the Center for Community Investment (CCI) at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. In the context of recent demonstrations and discussions about race and racism, she says, “people are noticing that Black and brown communities are not only at greater risk from COVID-19, but also frequently excluded from the very health benefits parks provide.”

Across the country, more than 100 million people lack safe and easy access to parks within a half-mile of home, says TPL. That number represents about 28 percent of the U.S. population, including 28 million children. In the nation’s 100 largest cities, 11.2 million people lack easy access. The organization says ensuring everyone in those cities has a nearby park would require adding 8,300 parks to the 23,000 that exist. Even where parks are available, inequities exist. A TPL study released in August reported that across the United States, parks serving primarily nonwhite populations are half the size of parks that serve majority white populations and five times more crowded. Parks serving majority low-income households are, on average, a quarter the size of parks that serve majority high-income households, and four times more crowded (TPL 2020a).

During the pandemic, states and cities have varied widely in their approaches to parks and open space. Some cities closed waterfronts and limited park access. Others sought to manage crowds by implementing controls such as timed entries or one-way signs. At the popular Katy Trail in Dallas, where visitors at a single entrance increased from 22,834 in early March to 34,366 by late March, officials instituted a voluntary system that allowed access on alternate days based on the first letter of a visitor’s last name. Some cities prohibited parking at packed parks, prompting equity questions on behalf of people who did not have the proximity or ability to walk or bike there. Other cities addressed the surge in demand for parks by converting streets into pedestrian-friendly spaces. During the initial months of the shutdown, “parks became the most valuable resource in the city,” says J. Nicholas Williams, director of the Oakland Parks, Recreation, and Youth Development Department.

To offer room for recreation in neighborhoods where parks were overcrowded or nonexistent, Oakland closed 74 miles of streets to all but emergency vehicles and local traffic in April. The city relied on a network of streets identified in a 2019 bicycle plan that had been developed with the participation of 3,500 residents.

The Slow Streets program—some version of which has been enacted in cities from Tucson, Arizona, to Providence, Rhode Island—was well received by many Oakland residents, but was also criticized for its initial focus on predominantly white neighborhoods. Working with residents and community groups in more racially and economically diverse areas such as East Oakland, Slow Streets expanded into new neighborhoods and launched “Slow Streets: Essential Places,” which improved pedestrian safety along routes to essential services such as grocery stores, food distribution sites, and COVID-19 test sites.

The Slow Streets program continues, but Williams says Oakland, whose population grew 10 percent in the past decade to 433,000, faces a greater need: “Oakland continues to grow . . . we have to set aside more park land and more equitable access to parks and open space.”

Equitable Park Planning

“City parks are at the center of resilient and equitable cities,” says Catherine Nagel, executive director of City Parks Alliance (CPA), an independent nationwide organization that has worked with mayors to leverage more than $190 million to build urban parks in underserved communities. “Our research shows some of the ways cities can leverage the equity, health, and environmental benefits of parks are to identify new sources of funding, new cost-sharing partnerships, and new [sources of] support.”

Cities are funding parks with adjacent sectors, drawing on or partnering with water, housing, and health departments, and “leveraging outside of the traditional park world,” Nagel says. Property developers are building public parks, and cities are partnering with business improvement districts and nonprofit organizations for programming and management responsibilities. “Parks are more complex than people think,” Nagel says. “They need intensive programming and maintenance, ongoing revenue streams, and the ability to interface with and reflect community user and local needs.”

With support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, CPA has worked on initiatives that analyze how cities are reallocating money to address equity concerns, how they’re leveraging funding from adjacent sectors, and how they’re innovating for equity and sourcing funding. CPA’s Equitable Park Funding Hub, an interactive online database set to launch this fall, will feature park funding opportunities related to brownfields, workforce development, community development, conservation, climate mitigation, and water and green infrastructure.

The Groundwork USA Network shares examples of park and green infrastructure projects that focus on community ownership and health equity gains for long-term residents in Reclaiming Brownfields (Groundwork USA 2017). In one project, Groundwork Denver helped with visioning, planning, and fundraising to transform a 5.5-acre brownfield site into the Platte Farm Open Space for the Globeville neighborhood in North Denver. Residents of the predominantly low-income Latinx neighborhood, which is surrounded by former industrial sites and bisected by interstates, led the project to restore native shortgrass prairie and install a pollinator garden and paved walking and biking trails. A $550,000 grant from the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment paid for construction and maintenance, which will be completed by the City and County of Denver Departments of Parks and Recreation and Transportation and Infrastructure.

The Denver project illustrates how cities can reimagine current assets. While most don’t have large tracts of vacant land, says Benepe of TPL, they could creatively retrofit brownfields, abandoned industrial sites, sanitary landfills, or railroad and utility rights of way, as high-profile projects like the High Line in New York and Millennium Park in Chicago have shown. Benepe says every city should analyze the equity of its park system and identify potential park and open space sites in underserved neighborhoods.

CCI’s Gaskins says the first step in equitable park planning is to “be in conversation with communities to get their vision for what they want parks to be, whether that’s building new parks or reimagining existing spaces.” Proximity and access are important, she says, “but it’s also the quality of the park and whether people feel welcomed and safe”—both in the park and en route to it.

Particularly in neighborhoods affected by gentrification, longtime residents often don’t feel like amenities such as parks that are introduced with new development are intended for them, Gaskins says. With new development, planners and other city officials should ensure a robust community engagement process. “Parks are more than infrastructure,” she says. “They offer access to programs and services, gathering spaces, and job opportunities that are also important for advancing health equity.”

Paying for Parks in Lean Times

Following the 2008 financial collapse, parks budgets were cut early and were among the last municipal budget items to recover. From 2009 to 2013, park spending dropped 21.2 percent, says NRPA, and by 2013, parks and recreation represented only 1.9 percent of local government expenditures. Deferred park maintenance for many large cities has been estimated in the billions of dollars.

Will parks budgets meet the same fate in the age of COVID? A late-June NRPA survey of more than 400 parks and recreation leaders found that two-thirds of their agencies had been asked to reduce operations spending between 10 to 20 percent for the fiscal year in effect on July 1, and 57 percent were facing 50 to 59 percent median reductions in capital spending. One in five reported their capital budgets had been zeroed out (Roth 2020).

Park advocates warn that city park systems have reached a critical tipping point, with heavy use and COVID-related budget cuts risking irreversible damage in 2020 and beyond. Some say priority funding for maintenance is critical to ensure that parks and green spaces are safe, attractive, and used, while others say investments in new capital projects would do more to help stimulate the economy for COVID recovery. Rachel Banner, NRPA director of park access, notes that park budgets that rely more on property taxes, which have been stable during the pandemic, may be in better shape than those that rely primarily on sales tax revenues. “Diversity in revenue streams is important,” says Banner. “Think about what’s important for resiliency in an economic downturn, like drawing from a variety of sources.”

One successful strategy NRPA has seen is to allocate a standard proportion of the general fund to parks and open space, “especially now that they are absolutely essential.” To address park equity in the capital budget, Banner says, some cities use prioritization criteria related to factors such as the quality of park space, age of equipment, ADA compliance, and neighborhood demographics including income, race, health outcomes, and car ownership.

In many cities and counties, dedicated tax campaigns have shown success in generating a significant portion of parks and open space funding. In March, Oakland voters passed Ballot Measure Q to create a 20-year tax, with 64 percent of the resulting revenues directed for parks, landscape maintenance, and recreational services beginning in FY 2020–2021. The success of Measure Q demonstrated that city residents have “turned a corner in recognizing the value of parks and open space,” says Oakland parks director Williams. While Measure Q doesn’t provide funding for new parks and open space, he says, it does address equity by providing funds to maintain and program smaller community and pocket parks. The measure was projected to bring in $13.4 million for parks in FY 20–21, a figure that hadn’t changed as of the city’s mid-cycle budget review this summer but will continue to be reviewed, Williams says.

Other successful ballot efforts include Denver’s Measure 2A, passed in 2018 and known as the Parks Legacy Fund. Between 2012 and 2017, the city’s population grew 11 percent, but park space increased by only 5 percent; the city also faced $130 million in deferred park maintenance. Combined with general funds, the Parks Legacy Fund was projected to produce $37.5 million a year to renovate parks, acquire land, and build new parks, trails, and open spaces, prioritizing high-need communities. The city expects to revise its budget to reflect COVID-related impacts this fall.

Last year, a ballot measure in New Orleans created hundreds of millions of dollars for parks over 20 years, with a priority for lower-income areas, says Bill Lee, TPL senior vice president of policy, advocacy, and government relations. Despite COVID’s impact on local economies, Lee is optimistic about other ballot-related funding prospects: “More than three-quarters of these measures pass in good and bad economic times, in red and blue states, because people see the value of parks and open space.”

Oklahoma City can attest. In November 2019, the city opened a 36-acre portion of Scissortail Park in the downtown core, on brownfield land that formerly featured abandoned buildings and junkyards. This first phase of the $132 million project features amenities such as a playground, interactive fountains, roller rink, café, performance stage, lake with boathouse and boat rentals, demonstration gardens, farmers’ market, lawn and promenade, and nearly 1,000 trees.

Scissortail Park is located next to the city’s new convention center and near the downtown library, arena, ballpark, and streetcar, all of which received funding from the Metropolitan Area Projects (MAPS) tax, a voter-approved penny sales tax created in 1993 to pay debt-free for projects to revitalize downtown and improve the city’s quality of life. A public-private partnership, the park also has benefitted from millions of dollars in donations, and it earns income from event and equipment rentals, sponsorships, food and beverage concessions, memberships, and grants. Ten years in planning and construction, the park by 2022 will include another 34 acres that will extend to the Oklahoma River with sports fields and natural areas, accessed by a bridge across Interstate 40.

Scissortail Park received a key allocation from the third round of MAPS funding; in December 2019, voters approved a fourth MAPS round, with $140 million dedicated to transforming the city’s neighborhood and community parks and sports facilities, part of a $978 million neighborhood and human services ballot measure.

“Scissortail is our cultural commons for downtown,” says Maureen Heffernan, CEO and president of the Scissortail Park Foundation, which manages the park and has kept it open with limited events and programming during the pandemic. Many people have expressed gratitude for Scissortail Park and the city’s nearby Myriad Botanical Gardens, which Heffernan also manages. “More than ever, beautifully maintained green space in urban areas has been a critical resource for people to enjoy and destress over the last few months,” she says. Urban parks “are something everyone wants and wants to fund, and they’re transformative,” Heffernan notes, adding that Oklahoma City “does not normally like to raise taxes, but residents have approved this MAPS tax because these tangible projects make a dramatic difference in people’s quality of life here.”

Park advocates also are looking to federal legislation for funding. The Great American Outdoors Act, signed into law in August, includes permanent funding from offshore oil and gas fees for the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF), making $900 million per year available for public lands, including city parks and trails. LWCF’s Outdoor Recreation Legacy Partnership (ORLP) program is a source for annual grants for urban areas with more than 50,000 residents, providing $25 million last year in grants ranging from $300,000 to $1 million, with priority given to projects in low-income areas that lack outdoor recreation opportunities.

Parks advocates also have their eye on potential federal stimulus funds. In May, 100 organizations, including TPL, CPA, NRPA, the American Planning Association, and the U.S. Conference of Mayors, asked Congress to include $500 million for jobs related to building or renovating parks in low-income urban areas as part of a future coronavirus stimulus package.

Public-Private Partnerships

In some cases, partnerships with nonprofits make the creation of parks possible. The Western Reserve Land Conservancy (WRLC), a Cleveland-based nonprofit, has conserved over 60,000 acres and created over 155 parks and preserves in the region since the late 1990s. WRLC has raised over $400 million to help land banks demolish 40,000 abandoned or vacant properties throughout Ohio, securing land for low-income communities until it can be redeveloped into parks, green spaces, or sites for affordable housing and other purposes.

Through its Reforest our City program, WRLC has planted more than 10,000 trees in Cleveland; WRLC bought a landfill on a linear site next to the zoo, cleaned up contamination, and developed the 25-acre Brighton Park with a walking/biking trail. Located in a densely populated area, the $1 million park, due to open in October, will be planted with 1,000 trees next year, and will be managed by the Metroparks District, says Jim Rokakis, WRLC vice president and coauthor of The Land Bank Revolution (Rokakis 2020). WRLC is also creating six neighborhood parks in Cleveland’s Mount Pleasant neighborhood that it will own or manage.

Other cities rely on business and philanthropic support to fund parks. About 90 percent of the $19 million cost for Detroit’s Campus Martius Park and surrounding infrastructure was funded by Detroit corporations and foundations. Owned by the city, the park is managed by the Downtown Detroit Partnership. The Indianapolis Cultural Trail, an eight-mile pedestrian and bike trail connecting eight cultural districts in downtown Indianapolis, is undergoing a $30 million expansion with $20 million from the Lilly Endowment, Inc., $5 million from the city, and $1 million from the Anthem Foundation. Cities are also partnering with private developers to build and operate new parks and open space. Since 1993, New York City’s waterfront zoning has required developers to provide public access to the waterfront. The zoning has led to the redevelopment of industrial sites into multiple parks that provide public access and build climate resilience.

The six-acre Domino Park on Brooklyn’s East River, opened in 2018, is part of an 11-acre site that will include the adaptive reuse of the historic Domino Sugar refinery and 3.3 million square feet of mixed-use development with 2,200 housing units, 700 of them affordable. Brooklyn-based developer Two Trees Management, which invested $50 million to build the park and spends $2 million annually on operations, worked closely with the community to identify needs such as a short access road to make the park feel truly public. The park, designed by James Corner Field Operations, includes a waterfront esplanade, recreation facilities, interactive fountains, a five-block artifact walk of salvaged factory machinery, and 175 trees. It provides public waterfront access for the first time in 160 years.

Another promising financing option is land value return, a mechanism through which cities recover the increases in property value triggered by rezoning or by investments in infrastructure. Also known as land value capture, this tool “will be an effective way for cities to convert underutilized spaces into parks and open space,” says Enrique Silva, the Lincoln Institute’s director of international initiatives.

Silva says cities could recover zoning-related increases in land value to secure land and pay for park development. Cities also can recover value through higher property tax assessments that lead to higher municipal tax revenues. City-owned vacant sites intended for buildings the cities can’t currently afford to build could also become temporary or permanent parks and lead to additional land value capture opportunities, he says. Municipal planning tools such as special assessments and transferable development rights also can help fund parks, open space, and infrastructure improvements.

Parks and open space can increase value in the form of climate resilience and now, with COVID, will be viewed as adding social value, says Silva. “There’s increasingly a sense that an investment in parks and open space as public infrastructure is an investment worth making, one that will have increased relevance as more public space is needed,” says Silva. “To the extent that COVID is forcing everyone to rethink public space and there’s a premium on open space in cities,” he says, steps including converting streets for pedestrian use and establishing new parks and open spaces are “where planning is going to lead.”

Survey on Pandemic and Public Spaces

A global survey conducted by Gehl, the Copenhagen-based design and planning firm that reimagined Times Square in New York City for pedestrians and bicyclists, reveals the importance of public space during the pandemic. Some 2,000 respondents from 40 U.S. states, 68 countries, and nearly every continent, about two-thirds of whom hailed from urban areas, shared views on the value of public space in their daily lives:

• 66 percent used nearby public spaces at least once a day, and 16 percent used them several times a day.

• Top public space destinations included the neighborhood street and sidewalk (87 percent), essential places like grocery stores (72 percent), neighborhood parks (67 percent), and stoops, yards, or courtyards (59 percent).

• Two thirds reported walking more during the pandemic; among car owners, that figure was 69 percent. 

Gehl’s suggestions for improving access and reducing overcrowding of parks and open spaces include:

• Reallocate space to allow for more physically distant walking, biking, and rolling through sidewalk extensions, parking lane closures, or street closures at the block or multiblock level.

• Prioritize space reallocation measures in neighborhoods without walkable (less than 15-minute) access to parks and essential services.

• Manage flow into more congested public spaces by expanding the number of entrances or by designating gateways as entry-only or exit-only.

• To support seniors and other vulnerable populations, ensure new public spaces create opportunities for sitting at safe distances, not just moving through.

Source: Gehl (https://gehlpeople.com/blog/public-space-playsvital-role-in-pandemic).

Kathleen McCormick, principal of Fountainhead Communications in Boulder, Colorado, writes frequently about healthy, sustainable, and resilient communities.

Lead Image: According to the Trust for Public Land, more than 100 million people—including 28 million children–lack safe and easy access to parks in the United States. Credit: portishead1/iStock.

References

10 Minute Walk. n.d. “Our Research.” https://10minutewalk.org/#Our-research.

Groundwork USA. 2017. Reclaiming Brownfields: Highlights from the Groundwork USA Network. Yonkers, NY: Groundwork USA. https://groundworkusa.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/GWUSABrownfields-Highlights-2017.pdf.

NRPA (National Recreation and Park Association). 2020. The Economic Impact of Parks: An Examination of the Economic Impacts of Operations and Capital Spending by Local Park and Recreation Agencies on the U.S. Economy. Ashburn, VA: National Recreation and Park Association. https://www.nrpa.org/siteassets/research/economic-impact-study-summary-2020.pdf.

———. 2019. 2019 Engagement with Parks Report. Ashburn, VA: National Recreation and Park Association. September. https://www.nrpa.org/globalassets/engagement-survey-report-2019.pdf.

Rokakis, James, and Gus Frangos. 2020. The Land Bank Revolution: How Ohio’s Communities Fought Back Against the Foreclosure Crisis. Cleveland, Ohio: Parafine Press.

Roth, Kevin. 2020. “NRPA Parks Snapshot: June 24–26 Survey Results.” Open Space (blog), National Recreation and Park Association. June 26. https://www.nrpa.org/blog/nrpa-parks-snapshot-june-24-26-survey-results/.

TPL (Trust for Public Land). 2020a. The Heat Is On: With Temperatures Rising and Quality Parks Too Few and Far Between, Communities of Color Face a Dangerous Disparity. San Francisco, CA: The Trust for Public Land. https://www.tpl.org/sites/default/files/The-Heat-is-on_A-Trust-for-Public-Land_special-report.pdf.

———. 2020b. Parks and the Pandemic: A Trust for Public Land Special Report. San Francisco, CA: The Trust for Public Land. https://www.tpl.org/parks-and-the-pandemic.