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

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

JON GOREY: What is the focus of your research?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lead image: Mark Anderson. Credit: Courtesy photo.

Some 150 heads of state, 195 countries, and a total of 85,000 participants engaged in the COP28 global climate summit in Dubai in December, which concluded with an appeal to triple renewable energy capacity and combat methane emissions, a goal to halt deforestation by 2030, an outline for a loss and damage fund, and the launch of a global stocktake to keep track of how nations are doing reducing carbon emissions.

Most of the headlines referred to a call at the close of COP28 for all nations to be focused on “transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly, and equitable manner.” Many had hoped for stronger language calling for the phasing out of oil and gas on a stricter timetable – and of course there was the fact that the summit itself was hosted by a region whose economy is fundamentally based on extracting and exporting fossil fuels. But it was the first time a COP declaration has specifically identified fossil fuels.

All of that could be fairly characterized as progress in the face of a planetary emergency. Still, 2023 was the hottest year on record, and current emissions are on track for a world that is 2.5 degrees warmer, well above the 1.5 degree Celsius goal set in the Paris Accords – the major international agreement to come out of the COP21 summit in 2015. Missing that target has contributed to more skepticism about COP, and the pledges and non-binding declarations that have followed, including some dashed hopes after COP26 in Glasgow two years ago.

Are these big summits what the world should be looking to? Are they designed to accomplish anything more than to keep the parties talking, taking stock, and keeping score on commitments? To break down the proceedings – and to consider progress that was made on other fronts, including land use and urban issues – this episode of the Land Matters podcast is devoted to a roundtable discussion with four Lincoln Institute staff members who were in Dubai: Amy Cotter and Patrick Welch from the climate strategies team, Anaclaudia Rossbach, who runs the Latin America program, and John Farner, the director of the Babbitt Center for Land and Water Policy.

“I gain a lot of encouragement from the prevailing understanding that these are systems and we can’t seek a single silver-bullet solution—we must embrace a multiplicity of solutions across different levels of government,” says Cotter. “But there’s both no time to waste and no single solution. The recognition of that, I hope, will break through analysis paralysis and finger-pointing.”

The next Conference of the Parties summit, COP29, will be hosted in December of this year in Azerbaijan, another petroleum state.

You can listen to the show and subscribe to Land Matters  on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Further Reading

Low-Carbon, Climate-Resilient Communities and Regions (Lincoln Institute)

From COP28 to green cities: A call to action (Public Square)

Top Findings from the IPCC Climate Change Report 2023 (World Resources Institute)

Harvard delegates reflect on COP28 (The Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability)

Bill McKibben on COP28, Maintaining Hope, and Walking in the Woods (Common Edge)

The World is Copping Out on Climate Change (Meer)

Local Solutions in Land: Multilevel Collaboration for Inclusive Climate Resilience (ICLEI Global)

Toward Win-Win Outcomes for Climate and Community (ICLEI Global)

Anthony Flint is a senior fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, host of the Land Matters podcast, and a contributing editor of Land Lines.

Lead image: A sculpture at COP28 in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Credit: Amy Cotter.

This content was developed through a partnership between the Lincoln Institute and the American Planning Association as part of the APA Foresight practice. It was originally published by APA in Planning. 

Blink twice and something new in the world is unfolding. It’s dizzying to think about, let alone remain informed about. Technological and social innovations continue to emerge and evolve. New economic trends and signals in the political arena are surfacing. And while new challenges and ever more crises keep us up at night, innovative developments promise potential solutions.

To stay a step ahead of the issues impacting the future of planning and our communities, the American Planning Association (APA) will publish its 2024 Trend Report for Planners in January, in partnership with the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. The APA Foresight team, together with APA’s Trend Scouting Foresight Community, identifies existing, emerging, and potential future trends that may impact the planning profession in the future. Planners need to understand these drivers of change, learn how they can prepare for them, and identify when it’s time to act.

The report includes more than 100 trends and shows how some trends are interconnected in various future scenarios — like the future of housing in a world of hybrid work, advanced AI capabilities and its potential impacts on planning decisions, and the future of climate mitigation amid current uncertainties about global collaboration and tech innovations. Many of the trends identified in previous reports remain relevant (and can be explored in the APA Trend Universe) but there are new ones, as well.

There also is the recognition that we are moving into a “polycrisis.” The climate emergency and its close connection to current global challenges — such as food insecurity, the migrant crisis, economic warfare, resource scarcity, and social disputes — highlights the high risk of failing to mitigate and adapt to climate change on a global scale. Holistic approaches are needed to resolve this developing polycrisis.

You’ll Work in a Bespoke Office — at Home or Downtown

As the pandemic recedes, the world of work continues to evolve. In the post-pandemic U.S., a dominant trend is the adoption of a hybrid workstyle combining remote and in-office work. A 2023 Pew Research Center survey found that 41 percent of remote-capable workers now follow hybrid schedules, up from 35 percent in January 2022. During that time, the number of people working from home full time decreased from 43 to 35 percent, but this is still significantly higher than the 7 percent who worked from home pre-pandemic. Worldwide, over one-third of office desks remain unoccupied throughout the week, though Asian and European employees have returned to workplaces faster than their U.S. counterparts.

The remaining question is what the future of the office might look like. While the number of fully remote workers seems to be going down in the U.S., space for the home office or a co-working space nearby will still be needed for hybrid workers. Meanwhile, for the companies that offer hybrid workstyles, we currently see two trends regarding the use of office space. Companies that are operating with shared offices or concierge office services tend to downsize their overall office space. Other companies emphasize collaboration and team building during their in-office time and therefore require more office space than before the pandemic to accommodate conference rooms, collaboration spaces, and space for creative activities.

Meanwhile, office-to-residential conversions are gaining interest. To further accelerate this trend, the Biden administration launched a commercial-to-residential conversion initiative in October 2023. Given these diverse directions and emerging trends, it looks like the office of the future will be fully bespoke and tailored to the customer’s needs, which will vary depending on emerging workstyles. —Petra Hurtado, PhD, and Sagar Shah, PhD, AICP

Climate Displacement on the Rise

In 2022, nearly 33 million people across the globe were displaced due to natural disasters, such as floods, drought, and wildfire, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre in Geneva. This far exceeds averages hovering near 20 million people in previous years.

In the U.S., climate displacement is a growing challenge. More than 3 million Americans lost their homes to natural disasters in 2022. As climate change continues to worsen, these numbers are expected to grow and even accelerate. By 2050, more than 1 billion people may be displaced due to climate-related impacts, according to the international think tank Institute for Economics and Peace. Adaptation at the local level will be critical. It will be imperative to prepare for the movement of people due to climate-related impacts and to more proactively retreat from especially high-risk areas.

Renewed discussion in the face of forced climate displacement has sought to better characterize managed retreat as a package of potential actions, rather than the wholesale abandonment of at-risk areas and the buyout of homes and properties. A June 2023 report from the University of Massachusetts Boston, together with representatives from coastal communities across the state, identified a variety of complementary tools for managed retreat, including enhanced setbacks, deed restrictions, green infrastructure, and an array of zoning and planning actions.

Yet, even as communities begin to understand the potential for these actions in concert with strategic retreat and buyout programs, continued development in hazardous areas remains the norm. In North Carolina, for example, for every buyout, 10 new homes were built in floodplains, according to a 2023 article in the Journal of the American Planning Association. Often, this is a result of market and insurance-based incentives that aren’t pricing long-term risk into development costs and home prices. —Scarlet Andrzejczak and Joe DeAngelis, AICP

Car-centric Planning Drives Inequities

Local governments and planners are overwhelmed with many emerging transportation systems popping up. While there are lots of exciting innovations in the transportation sector, the real story is that the ways cities are currently responding to these new systems are increasing inequities and harming communities. Today’s more diverse transportation system needs a different approach to transportation planning — one that doesn’t focus on cars.

Most new alternatives to the car are more sustainable, safer, healthier, and potentially easier to deploy in equitable ways. Usage is going up, with e-bikes on the rise in the U.S. for a few years (with 2022 sales topping $1.3 billion) and the popularity of bike-share programs and the market for cargo bikes also continuing to grow. However, cities often are unprepared for these new transportation options resulting — in some cases — to bans instead of plans to integrate them into existing systems.

Meanwhile, inequitable, car-centric planning practices continue to dominate. The rising number of traffic deaths and decreasing traffic safety, coupled with the lack of appropriate infrastructure for emerging systems, show the inequity in current transportation planning. While e-mobility is a part of the solution when it comes to decarbonizing transportation (as was noted in the 2023 Trend Report), electric vehicles (EVs) also come with many negative effects, including the concentration of public EV chargers mostly in wealthy areas.

Assigning space by means of transportation instead of purpose isn’t working anymore. A holistic, comprehensive approach toward equitable transportation planning and funding is needed. —Zhenia Dulko and Petra Hurtado

‘Made in America’ Comes Roaring Back

Geopolitical goals are becoming an increasingly deciding factor in economic policy and international trade. Self-sufficiency and independence from rival powers are resulting in an increase in friend-shoring and onshoring, financed through subsidies, a variety of policies, visa bans, and even exclusion of companies from specific markets. This includes, for example, U.S. policies toward certain high-tech products coming from China. Additionally, U.S. companies are actively seeking alternative manufacturing destinations to replace China, moving to countries such as India, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Bangladesh.

Meanwhile, manufacturing is coming back to the U.S., supported by new federal incentives to promote domestic manufacturing of crucial components, such as computer chips and EV parts. This trend has had tangible effects, with the sector adding nearly 800,000 jobs since early 2021 — reaching employment levels not seen since 2008. Additionally, U.S. manufacturing employment has exceeded the peak of the previous business cycle for the first time since the late 1970s, according to jobs data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

But workforce challenges persist. As of March 2023, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce said there were still 693,000 open positions in the manufacturing sector — and, according to some estimates, there may be around 2.1 million unfilled jobs by 2030.

Additionally, the introduction of the Tech Hubs program — a $500 million economic development initiative — is fostering technology hubs across the U.S., addressing regional disparities and promoting technology-driven economic growth in traditionally industrial regions. The Biden administration’s initiative aims to transform 31 regions into globally competitive innovation centers. These Tech Hubs span urban and rural areas, focusing on industries such as quantum computing, biotechnology, and clean energy. —Petra Hurtado and Sagar Shah

Extinct Species Get a Mammoth Rebirth

The concept of bringing back extinct species, discussed as part of a deep dive into rewilding in the 2023 Trend Report, has already seen some significant recent updates. Resurrection biology is centered on the revival or recreation of extinct species of plants and animals. The current destruction of the natural world, the impacts of climate change, and the steady march of ecosystem loss are leading to the rapid extinction of species across the world. Notably, resurrection biology might be critical both for bringing back long-lost species and reversing the ongoing extinction of current species.

De-extinction science relies on three different methods: cloning (using DNA of extinct species to clone new animals), back-breeding (for example, selectively breeding elephants to recreate mammoths), and gene editing (adding or removing traits from existing species’ DNA to recreate extinct species). Media interest largely centers on the resurrection of mammoths, dodos, and other high-profile extinctions.

However, this concept could be applied in more mundane but vitally important circumstances, such as insect extinctions — which are a major threat to the resilience of the global food supply and the health of ecosystems. This technology might one day help to reverse major impacts by reviving key extinct species. Planners should consider not only the long-term implications of this technology but also the ecosystem loss and the rapid species extinction occurring today that drive its continued relevancy. —Joe DeAngelis and Petra Hurtado

Co-creation Mirrors DIY Trends

Urban dwellers are increasingly embracing do-it-yourself (DIY) methods and self-organization. A trend toward co-creation is emerging as a collaborative approach in which planners and end users jointly develop solutions. This process emphasizes deep user engagement facilitated by new technologies. Consequently, there’s growing skepticism toward traditional experts and a surge in the creator economy.

Communities are becoming more proactive, self-regulated, and interconnected. Start-ups like Urbanist AI — leveraging advanced AI capabilities — are empowering users to step into the role of “citizen planners,” allowing them to actively co-design their surroundings. While this makes the planning process more intricate and less predictable, it also ensures a more inclusive approach. Such technology-driven self-organization and co-creation could significantly reshape the future of the planning profession and its approaches. —Zhenia Dulko and Petra Hurtado

It’s Time to Welcome the Robots

Robots of all shapes and sizes are entering our cities. Seoul, South Korea, has recently developed plans for a robot-friendly city, proactively envisioning the wide-ranging integration of robots into everyday life. While “personal delivery devices” that deliver packages and meals in the air and on the ground are already coming, trends point to the potential for robots to fulfill a variety of other functions within society, including taking care of the very young and the elderly.

In nations grappling with the challenge of low birth rates, especially in Europe and Asia, the burden of care and the fulfilling of critical functions within cities may increasingly fall upon robots and other autonomous technologies. This includes mundane but vital services, such as street cleaning, public safety, and transit services.

With potential widespread adoption of these recent innovations looming, cities will need to be prepared to effectively integrate and consider them in their plans and ensure they won’t disrupt accessibility of public spaces. Some ideas for how to do that are coming from the Urban Robotics Foundation by bringing urban stakeholders together to create solutions to integrate new technology into cities and communities. —Senna Catenacci and Joe DeAngelis

Lead image: Urbanist AI allows community members to co-create with planners — and participate more fully in the design of places. Credit: Urbanist AI.