Delivering Community Benefits from Community Lands Through Conservation and Nature-Based Solutions
As communities across the country face the combined impacts of the housing affordability crisis, climate change, and biodiversity loss, state and local governments are exploring how to deploy underutilized land they own to meet multiple community needs. The Lincoln Institute’s Community Land for Community Benefits campaign aims to inform, complement, and increase the speed and scale of the work required to identify these lands and decide how to use them.
Conserved natural areas provide public benefits and ecosystem services
Most often, state and local officials are using community land to fill gaps in the affordable housing supply. As these efforts become more common, communities should ensure that conservation and development work together, not against one another.
Conserved lands are natural infrastructure. They’re essential to delivering clean air and water and supporting public health and recreation. They provide water filtration, flood control, groundwater recharge, climate regulation, air quality, coastal protection, habitat protection for pollinators, and other ecosystem services that are imperative to strengthening resilience in a changing climate.
As community leaders work to ensure that state and locally owned lands produce enduring benefits for residents, it will be essential to identify and delineate natural and working lands such as forests, wetlands, grasslands, and agricultural lands for conservation. Prioritizing lands that strengthen ecological connectivity will help secure ecosystem services at a large scale. Using durable mechanisms such as conservation easements will help secure long-term benefits that serve present and future generations.
Conservation and affordable housing development can find common ground
In many places and communities, tensions may arise between affordable housing development and sustainable land and resource management. But as efforts like the Conservation Lands Foundation’s Shared Ground initiative demonstrate, these enterprises do not have to clash if decisions about land use are made wisely. Affordable housing is often more compatible with land conservation than market-rate housing development is. Ensuring that affordable housing is built on already-developed, transit-accessible, underutilized parcels—rather than on converted natural or working lands—increases densification and alleviates pressure on urban, suburban, and rural natural areas and open space. And communities may be more likely to support affordable housing if it is paired with conserved open space to which they have access.
Conservation is just one of many nature-based solutions
In addition to the direct benefits of conserving community land, such as fostering healthy natural ecosystems and creating community well-being through public access to green space, the idea of using community land for nature-based solutions is gaining traction.
Nature-based solutions are actions to preserve or protect natural or modified ecosystems in ways that benefit both humans and biodiversity. In urban and suburban or rural contexts, this refers to green infrastructure deployed in and around the human-built environment, such as rain and pollinator gardens, community gardens, bioswales, green roofs, retention ponds, and tree plantings. Such interventions are frequently designed to reduce the flood impacts of runoff from impervious surfaces—such as roads, parking lots, sidewalks, and rooftops—which is particularly important during storm events. In suburban and rural environments, this list can expand to include riparian buffer zones that protect streams and rivers from agricultural runoff, and wetlands protections that ensure floodplain connectivity and help sustain water supply and regional hydrologic function. In most cases, these forms of nature-based solutions and other targeted interventions create shading and cooling effects, reducing heat-island impacts.
Communities facing extreme weather events, water stress, and other climate shocks are pursuing nature-based solutions with new urgency. These practices are being combined with concepts like climate-resilient zoning, which restricts development in high-risk flood zones or fire corridors. For example, dedicating community land to the development of “flood-able” parks and green spaces—which are intentionally engineered to receive floodwater during a storm event—builds climate resilience while strengthening the region’s biodiversity and ecosystem function. Similarly, in suburban and rural areas in arid climates, approaches such as managed-aquifer recharge—which directs floodwater to specific parcels of land to recharge the groundwater basin—are reducing water stress and increasing drought resilience.
Deploying land through a multiple-benefits frame
In short, the most innovative communities fully leverage their community land by exploring multipurpose re-use concepts and solutions to address an uncertain future. Bringing together housing, conservation, and nature-based solutions in a portfolio approach is the key to ensuring that state and locally owned lands deliver multiple, enduring benefits that enable human communities—and the natural systems on which they depend—to flourish.
Chandni Navalkha is director of conservation and stewardship and Peter Colohan is director of partnerships and program innovation at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.
Lead image: Urban Garden and stream at Mears Park in Lowertown St. Paul. Credit: JoeChristensen via Getty Images.