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

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

JON GOREY: What is the focus of your research?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lead image: Mark Anderson. Credit: Courtesy photo.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Recognizing Informal Land Conservation

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

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

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

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

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

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

An Array of Approaches

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Land policy decisions may not pack the headline punch of celebrity gossip or World Cup comebacks, but they can be far more consequential to people’s everyday lives. In that spirit, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy awarded prizes for excellence in journalism on urban policy, sustainable development, and climate change at the 2023 Latin American Conference of Investigative Journalism (COLPIN) in Mexico City.  

The winning entries included an exploration of how climate finance mechanisms trap poorer countries in a cycle of debt and dependency, an account of indigenous land grabbing by an unscrupulous palm oil exporter, and a look at how luxury megaprojects in a Mexico City neighborhood threaten to drain the water supply for longtime residents. (Jump to the list of winners.)

This marks the second year that the Premio Lincoln has been awarded at the prestigious conference, which includes its own investigative reporting competition, as well as dozens of workshops and panel discussions held over four days. COLPIN is organized by the Lima, Peru–based Instituto Prensa y Sociedad (Press and Society Institute), or IPYS.  

Competition for the 2023 award—which drew 141 entries from 47 cities and 15 countries—was inspiring, says Laura Mullahy, senior program manager at the Lincoln Institute. The contest attracted so many worthy entries that she and the other judges decided to name three honorable mention winners this year, in addition to the top prizes. The 2023 winners hailed from Costa Rica, Brazil, and Mexico; last year’s winning entries were published in Mexico and Colombia.

The breadth of geography, topics, and media formats represented in the contest is an encouraging sign for Latin American journalism, Mullahy says—as are the winners themselves. “It was really very heartening to meet these talented, young, earnest journalists,” says Mullahy, who presented the awards both years. 

Empowering the Press

The Lincoln Institute has a long history of engaging journalists with its research, both in the United States—where for over 20 years, the organization’s Journalists Forum has convened members of the press around a central topic, such as climate change and housing—and in Latin America. The institute began offering land policy training classes for Brazilian journalists a decade ago, when economist Martim Smolka was the director of the Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) program. “Back when Martim was director,” Mullahy recalls, “he always said, ‘There are three audiences I would do anything to get in a room, but they’re hard to get: members of parliament, judges, and journalists.’ So that was always in the back of my mind.”

At the time, Mullahy says, there was very little coverage of land policy in Latin American media, and what coverage did exist wasn’t always well informed; it wasn’t a topic journalists in the region encountered in their formal education. “Land policy is a little bit niche,” Mullahy says. “And so the thought was, well, maybe we’re the ones who can provide this.” 

With the goal of introducing core land policy concepts to journalists, the Lincoln Institute then partnered with IPYS to host a larger series of Latin America-wide training courses. Each session drew 30 or more participants, all of whom had to submit professional clips to be accepted into the program. By 2022, enough journalists were creating well-researched, engaging land use stories throughout Latin America that Mullahy and Adriana León at IPYS discussed the idea of offering a prize for urban land use reporting. “The stars seemed to align,” Mullahy says, and the inaugural Premio Lincoln drew more than 160 entries from 19 countries.

In addition to cash prizes—$3,000 for first place, $2,000 for second, and $1,000 for third—Lincoln Award winners are invited to attend and participate in the four-day COLPIN conference. At the 2022 conference in Rio de Janeiro, “Our panel discussion with the award recipients and two seasoned journalists who served on the selection committee highlighted how land policy-related stories can be developed as compelling journalistic reporting,” Mullahy says. This year’s winners joined a trio of veteran journalists—Miguel Jurado and Vanina Berghella of Argentina, and Chico Regueira of Brazil—for a session on researching cities and urban development.

Journalists are important allies to the Lincoln Institute’s mission, Mullahy says, but even those with an interest in land policy issues don’t always get the support they need from their editors or organizations. So it’s important to recognize and support those who bring quality urban and land use reporting into the mainstream.

Alongside the Lincoln Institute’s more than 30-year tradition of conducting research and offering free professional development courses in Latin America, the efforts to encourage and celebrate informed land use journalism is paying off, and not just for the prizewinners. Mullahy can see positive changes in Latin American land management practices “in which Lincoln Institute courses and their students have had an influence and, in some cases, an active role,” she told the LatAm Journalism Review. “We know our presence can make a difference.” 

2023 Winners

Here are the winners of the 2023 Lincoln Prize for Journalism on Urban Policy, Sustainable Development, and Climate Change: 

First place: Hassel Fallas and Michelle Soto from Costa Rica for their eight-article series, “¡Muéstrame el dinero! La ruta de los fondos climáticos en un mundo cada vez más caliente” (“Show Me the Money! The Route of Climate Funds in an Increasingly Hot World”), published in a collaboration between La Data Cuenta and Ojo al Clima.  

The series explores the global climate financing system to reveal a complex but unequal financial architecture that favors the interests of the Global North and hurts the most vulnerable countries, who have contributed least to the problem. Based on the analysis of databases from multiple sources, the series signals the need to correct the inequities in the distribution of resources and protect the planet for future generations.  

Second place: Karla Mendes for her article “Exportadora de óleo de palma acusada de fraude, grilagem de terras em cemitérios quilombolas” (“Brazil Palm Oil Exporter Accused of Fraud, Land-Grabbing in Quilombola Cemeteries”), published in Mongabay, Brazil.  

The article exposes a wide range of land-grabbing allegations against Agropalma, the only Brazilian company with a sustainability certificate issued by the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), claiming that more than half of the 264,000 acres registered by Agropalma was derived from fraudulent land titles and even the creation of a fake land registration bureau. Moreover, the allegations assert that part of the area occupied by Agropalma overlaps with ancestral Quilombola land, including two cemeteries. The feature is available in three languages: 

Portuguese:  Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3  
English: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3  
Spanish: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 

Third place: Alejandro Melgoza Rocha and Jennifer González Posadas for “Ciudad sin agua. Un pueblo contra el gigante de concreto” (“A City Without Water: The People Against a Concrete Giant”), published in Mexico’s N+.  

This multimedia feature and video examine the complex issue of water scarcity in Mexico City, where the construction of luxury towers and shopping centers has depleted aquifers in the metropolitan zone, putting the ecosystems of the city at risk. As communities and indigenous peoples suffer from water shortages, road congestion, destruction of green areas, increased costs of services, and dispossession of their territory, the inaction of the authorities against developers has resulted in chaotic conflict. The article tells the story of residents taking on the most powerful player in the real estate industry.   

Honorable mention: Thiago Medaglia, Brazil, for “Aquazônia—A Floresta-Água” (“Aquazonia—The Water Rainforest”)  

Honorable mention: Aldo Facho Dede, Kenneth Sánchez Gonzales, and Vania García Pestana, Peru, for the podcast series “Ciudades Que Inspiran” (“Cities That Inspire”) 

Honorable mention: Juan Diego Ortiz Jiménez, of Colombia, for “Nómadas, Airbnb y falta de casas: en Medellín no hay cama para tanta gente” (“Nomads, Airbnb, and Housing Shortage: In Medellín, There Aren’t Enough Beds”) 

2022 Winners  

First place: Alejandro Melgoza Rocha (N+ Focus, Mexico), for “Tulum: un paraiso ilegal” (“Tulum, an Illegal Paradise”) 

Second place: Mónica Rivera Rueda (El Espectador, Colombia), for “Lo que debe saber del POT en Bogotá” (“What You Need to Know about the Land Management Plan in Bogotá”)  

Third place: Andrés de la Peña Subacius (Zona Docs, Mexico), for “La ciudad inhabitable: ¿Redensificación o destrucción de la vivienda?” (“The Inhabitable City: Housing Redensification or Destruction?”) 

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

Lead image: The opening ceremony of the 2023 Latin American Conference of Investigative Journalism (COLPIN) at the Colegio San Ildefonso, Mexico City. The backdrop is Diego Rivera’s first mural, La Creación (Creation), 1922. Credit: Laura Mullahy.

Natural ecosystems offer some powerful solutions to our climate crisis. And nature holds answers to other environmental challenges as well—like figuring out how to feed a growing human population without contributing to climate change, pollution, and toxic algal blooms.  

The invention of synthetic fertilizer allowed farmers to double their yields per acre in the past century, supporting some four billion additional humans. But its use and production can have serious ecological impacts. Along with methane from livestock and the carbon released by soil disturbance, fertilizer is a primary reason why agriculture accounts for about 10 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in the US. But new funding models in the Midwest are providing an incentive to farmers to swap status quo techniques for more sustainable practices.    

The high-temperature production of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer is by itself responsible for 1.4 percent of global carbon emissions. After that fertilizer is applied to crops, it can release nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas 245 times more potent than carbon dioxide. And excess nitrogen also finds its way into waterways, polluting drinking supplies and wildlife habitat and, in the American Midwest and Plains, flowing down the Mississippi River to create a vast, headline-making “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico, where it feeds toxic algal blooms that suck the oxygen out of the water. 

“That is the principal cause of these dead zones and toxic algal blooms in the Gulf of Mexico,” says Jim Levitt, director of the International Land Conservation Network at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. “The Mississippi River collects fertilizer runoff from Montana all the way to Pittsburgh, and sends it down in one big spout that flows into the Gulf of Mexico, and it becomes this concentrated soup of nitrogen and phosphorus.”  

However, some fairly simple practices can reduce how much fertilizer farmers need, and how much ends up polluting watersheds. First and foremost, says Matthew Helmers, director of the Iowa Nutrient Research Center at Iowa State University, is resisting the tendency to over-fertilize. About a third of farmers apply more nitrogen than necessary, sometimes in an effort to maximize yields or hedge against risk.  

“If we can reduce the rate, and not reduce yields for the crop,” he says, that cuts nitrogen loss as well as costs for the farmer. Iowa State and other universities developed a calculator to help Midwestern farmers determine the best amount of nitrogen to use depending on their goals. And simply fertilizing in the spring instead of in the fall can also reduce nitrogen runoff by an average of 6 percent.  

Beyond better fertilizer management, regenerative farming—a more holistic and sustainable approach to agriculture that can help restore degraded soil, enhance biodiversity, and protect water and other resources—can also help reduce nitrogen runoff. 

One of the most basic regenerative farming practices is planting cover crops in between growing seasons. “That’s where we try to have something green out there during the period when we’re not growing our cash crop,” Helmers says, “covering the soil surface and taking up nutrients that might otherwise be susceptible to loss.”  

A perennial cover crop such as rye or oat stabilizes the soil, but also converts excess water-soluble nitrate into plant matter, “so there’s less nitrate that could be leached away in the next rainfall event,” Helmers explains. Rarely employed just 30 years ago, the use of cover crops nearly doubled in Iowa between 2017 to 2021, to an estimated 2.8 million acres.  

Other in-field practices include a diverse crop rotation—alternating corn or soybean seasons with forage crops, for example—or growing an energy crop such as switchgrass, which can be used to produce renewable natural gas. (That may sound like gas-powered greenwashing, but it’s a real technology.) Low- or no-till farming, meanwhile, which reduces soil disturbance and leaves most of the plant residue on the surface after harvest, can cut nitrous oxide emissions and help soil retain more carbon and nutrients. No-till farming is now employed on 41 percent of Iowa farmland, or 9.5 million acres.

The edge of a farm offers one more chance to halt nitrogen loss as water drains off the cropland and into nearby waterways. “We have a whole suite of practices to treat that water before we deliver it to a stream, and they’re kind of utilizing Mother Nature to promote denitrification,” Helmers says, referring to the natural process that converts nitrate into dinitrogen, the inert, stable gas that makes up most of Earth’s atmosphere.  

In one configuration, underground drainage systems can be diverted so they release water perpendicular to a stream instead of directly into it, forcing it to flow slowly across a 30-foot vegetated buffer. If the soil in that buffer zone doesn’t contain enough organic matter to promote denitrification, then installing a bioreactor—which sounds high-tech, but is simply a trench full of wood chips—can help do the job. These simple methods can reduce nitrate loss by 42 percent or more. 

“We could also route that drainage water to a wetland—that might be a riverine wetland next to the stream, or an oxbow wetland, or one that we restore,” Helmers says. In addition to providing ecological benefits to the landscape, “those can be very effective for promoting denitrification.”   

Despite the impact of nitrates on both local drinking water and the Gulf’s marine environment, these practices remain voluntary in Iowa and in most other states. But there are federal and local cost-share programs designed to encourage their adoption, some more robust than others.  

Iowa’s Polk County, for example, offers both financial and logistical assistance for installing edge-of-field buffers, making it easier and more economical for farmers who might otherwise be put off by the hassle or cost. And since water treatment plants are finding that it’s more efficient to pay farmers to reduce fertilizer runoff at the source than to build additional treatment facilities, new funding models have emerged that encourage more farmers to introduce conservation measures to their land.  

The multistate Soil and Water Outcomes Fund, for example, pays farmers to create vegetative buffers, plant cover crops, or employ other regenerative agriculture techniques chosen by the farmer. Later in the year, an independent scientific team measures and verifies the reduction in nitrogen or increase in stored soil carbon. The fund then sells a mix of environmental credits to various public and private entities seeking to meet required or voluntary sustainability goals. Water quality credits, for example, allow water treatment facilities subject to strict nutrient reduction standards to fund pollution mitigation at the source instead of paying for expensive new equipment. Carbon offsets, meanwhile, are tied to the amount of additional carbon stored in the soil.  

Importantly, given the growing and valid criticism aimed at carbon offset schemes, those credits are tied to actual outcomes, “after they have been produced and verified,” says Eric Letsinger, CEO of Quantified Ventures, whose AgOutcomes subsidiary jointly manages the fund with the Iowa Soybean Association. The outcomes-based model is “a demonstrably more cost-effective means of achieving environmental improvements than existing ‘pay for practices’ approaches,” he adds, in a paper prepared for the Environmental Defense Fund.  

“Basically the sewage treatment plant pays into a fund, and the fund will contract with soybean farmers to manage their land in a different way, so as to reduce the amount of phosphorus and nitrogen that reaches the streams,” Levitt explains. “That’s a natural climate solution that is applicable to the entire Mississippi River Valley, and will clean up the water more efficiently than building engineered filters into the streams of Guttenberg, Iowa, or Des Moines.”  

In 2021 and 2022, the Soil and Water Outcomes Fund expanded from Iowa into eight more states, and paid farmers an average of $31 per acre to implement new conservation measures on over 241,000 acres of cropland. Those practices prevented 3.4 million pounds of nitrogen and 206,000 pounds of phosphorus from reaching waterways, and sequestered over 465 million pounds of carbon.  

Still, there’s a lot more ground to cover—literally—including millions of acres in Iowa alone. Cultural barriers remain, with some longtime farmers wary of deviating from a proven formula.  

“We need to get over that hump of changing what’s the norm,” Helmers says, perhaps hinting at the most powerful untapped nature-based solution of all: human nature. “We still need to create a sense of urgency—that we have a problem, and we need to do something about it.” 

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

Lead image: This map illustrates how runoff from farms (green areas) and cities (red areas) drains into the Mississippi River, delivering nutrients into the Gulf of Mexico and fueling the annual hypoxic zone. Credit: NOAA.