Protecting Puerto Rico’s Biodiversity

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

Fernando Lloveras San Miguel has served as executive director of the Conservation Trust of Puerto Rico for more than two decades, and as president of its Para La Naturaleza unit since its founding in 2013. With degrees in economics and geography from Dartmouth College, public policy from Harvard University, and law from the University of Puerto Rico, Lloveras knows his way around both natural and legal landscapes. 

In 2020, Lloveras received the Kingsbury Browne Conservation Leadership Award and Fellowship, named for the Boston lawyer and former Lincoln Institute fellow whose work led to the creation of the Land Trust Alliance. (The award is now known as the Kingsbury Browne Distinguished Practitioner program.) In this interview, which has been edited for length and clarity, Lloveras discusses what it will take to conserve 33 percent of Puerto Rico by 2033, the unique conservation finance strategies Para La Naturaleza is using to achieve that goal, and the movement to recognize the inherent rights of nature.

JON GOREY: What is the focus of your work?

FERNANDO LLOVERAS SAN MIGUEL: Our work has been centered on providing the islands of Puerto Rico with the biodiversity and life systems that are needed to live a sustainable life. We set a goal in 2016 to protect 33 percent of the islands by 2033, so that’s our overarching goal: having Puerto Rico as a living organism and providing healthy and sustainable ecosystems for everybody.

We set this goal, and the year after we got Hurricane Maria, which was a Category 5 hurricane that devastated the whole island. And then we had a lot of issues with our funding source, and we’ve had a lot of pro-development policies going on. So there’s been a huge amount of challenges that we have faced, and are facing. But in general, I think we have been able to overcome some of those. We recently secured more funding that will allow us to do more long-term planning and long-term acquisitions, and land protection and biodiversity protection. So we have been able to navigate in very rough waters, and I think we’re in good shape, even though the challenges keep increasing every day.

JG: What are you working on now, and what are you hoping to work on next?

FL: Last year we worked really hard to do a new strategic plan, so we just finished and adopted that late last year. One of the challenges we were able to overcome was around conservation easements. [In Puerto Rico] we have a cap on the amount of tax credits that are available, and we used to have up to $15 million a year, but then it went down to $3 million. We got it back to $15 million, so we got that win in the legislature here, and now we have capacity to do more conservation easements.

In terms of land acquisitions, we have a lot in the pipeline. We have a lot of properties that are in the due diligence process, doing inventories and measurements. We do a very sophisticated biodiversity documentation, using a land conservation matrix, to see which ones are more critical for conservation.

The coastal areas are the most high-risk areas, and they’re also the most expensive areas. So that’s been a big challenge, because Puerto Rico has been developed a lot around the coastal areas. We have disconnected a lot of the ocean and coastal marine areas from the mountains and rivers. So we need to create more corridors as part of our Map 33 plan. We have two, maybe three, very important coastal areas that are critical, but are extremely expensive, so we’re juggling to see how we can get those protected.

JG: Are there any legal or cultural differences that affect how land is used or conserved in Puerto Rico versus the mainland United States?

FL: We have adopted a lot of the urban sprawl mentality, to have suburbs, to have shopping malls everywhere. We have adopted a lot of US commercial development patterns in a very small place. We’re only 100 miles by 35 miles, and we have 3 million people living here, so the population density is very high, which creates a higher cost of land. And then sprawl happens because we haven’t had a good land use planning system. The sprawl and the construction creates a lot of disconnection between ecosystems.

We also have some special arrangements with the Puerto Rico government that I don’t know if other NGOs in the States can have. We are authorized by the Puerto Rico Treasury to issue tax-free bonds to finance conservation. So we’re very unique, because Puerto Rico is not within the tax jurisdiction of the US, so the Treasury Department in Puerto Rico tends to have more leeway.

JG: Are there other innovative conservation finance strategies you’re pursuing?

FL: We are a very complex and unique organization in terms of financing. We have been able to create an endowment, and that’s been a game changer for us. Our endowment covers pretty much 70 percent of our operational costs, so that gives us a lot of stability. I usually recommend that organizations start looking into how to support at least a core, basic operational cost on a more sustainable basis, like an endowment, because I know the struggle that a lot of NGOs go through, making the payrolls every month. That’s a stress that just wears down anybody. So that’s something that we have been building for the past 30 to 40 years.

Since Puerto Rico has a lot of low-income communities, we qualify for what’s called a new market tax credit, which is a tax credit created to incentivize investment in low-income areas. So we’ve been using that mechanism. We’re also doing a mitigation bank, which is about to get started, and that is expected to provide some revenue.

JG: What’s one thing you wish more people understood about land conservation and natural ecosystems?

FL: We have a whole unit called the ecological culture unit, which is really restoring not only the awareness, but the understanding, that we are part of a natural ecosystem, and that we need to coexist with other species.

We do things automatically, just because the economic numbers work out, but we’re forgetting the whole functioning and life systems of the island. So we’re doing a lot of educational work, a lot of communication work with students. We have summer camps, we have different types of programs to get people to understand that their decisions are important.

JG: Is there anything surprising or unexpected that you’ve encountered in your work?

Not totally unexpected, but hurricanes—I mean both climatic hurricanes and political hurricanes. We have been living through great changes in terms of the importance of nature. So that’s kind of the big changes that were not expected on the negative side. On the positive side, as I say, we have been able to secure some stability into the future.

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

FL: We have the opportunity to achieve [our 33 percent by 2033 goal], but we need to change a lot of the development mentality that is still very strong. I mean, they’re talking about doing a huge 2,000-acre complex with five hotels. That’s kind of the nightmare at night, having all these mega-projects which are not at all sensitive to the environment, destroying 2,000 acres of land. It’s just a huge impact to our island. That’s the biggest thing, just to make sure that we can move our development mindset toward a sustainable economic framework instead of the total destruction framework that we have right now.

JG: What have you been reading lately?

FL: One of our objectives now is to have nature’s inherent rights recognized. So we’re working with this movement, sprung out of Indigenous communities, of having nature have its own rights—so not only laws to protect endangered species and so forth, but laws that give nature legal personality to be able to sue and protect itself. It’s a different approach to legal protection, having nature be recognized as a living organism, able to have legal rights. We’re going to have a panel discussion on this issue at Climate Week in New York next month. The Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature website, GARN.org, has a lot of good information. Every single country in the world has adopted rights of nature laws or regulations. Even in the US, there are quite a few examples of Indian tribes and other states that have provided some rights of nature.

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

Lead image: Fernando Lloveras San Miguel, executive director of the Conservation Trust of Puerto Rico and former Kingsbury Browne fellow at the Lincoln Institute. Credit: Courtesy photo.