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Ebonie Alexander, executive director of the Black Family Land Trust, has been named the 2022–2023 Kingsbury Browne Fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and the recipient of the Kingsbury Browne Conservation Leadership Award from the Land Trust Alliance. Working at the intersection of equity and conservation, Alexander is committed to promoting and ensuring rightful ownership and stewardship of inherited family land for African American landowners and other historically underserved populations in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and other states.
“Ebonie is a leader in a space where she had to be a true pioneer and innovator,” said Andrew Bowman, president and CEO of the Land Trust Alliance. “Those qualities have allowed her to be the driving force behind innovative programs and state policy changes in support of landowners who have historically been overlooked. She has moved land conservation beyond its traditional boundaries. And with this award and fellowship, Ebonie will continue to inspire us.”
Alexander received the award at Rally 2022: The National Land Conservation Conference, sponsored by the Land Trust Alliance. The Kingsbury Browne award and fellowship, given annually since 2006, honor people who have enriched the conservation community with their outstanding leadership, innovation, and creativity in land conservation. They are named for a Boston tax lawyer and conservationist who served as a Lincoln Institute fellow in 1980 and inspired the founding of the Land Trust Alliance in 1982.
At the Black Family Land Trust, which is based in Durham, North Carolina, Alexander designed the Wealth Retention and Asset Protection (WRAP) program and African American Land Ethic, two initiatives that have helped landowners retain family ownership and control of more than $12.5 million of their land assets and secured more than $500,000 of federal funding to support farmland conservation.
During her year as a Kingsbury Browne fellow, Alexander will engage in research, writing, and mentoring, and facilitate a project that builds upon and shares her experience with the broader community. “Ebonie Alexander is a remarkable and passionate leader in the vanguard of efforts to protect open space, working farms, and diverse cultural heritage for generations to come,” said Jim Levitt, director of the International Land Conservation Network at the Lincoln Institute. “We are very excited to get to know her, to work with her, and to share her insights with land trust colleagues from coastal Virginia to the Pacific highlands, and beyond.”
Image: Ebonie Alexander speaks with a landowner as part of her work with the Black Family Land Trust. Credit: DJ Glisson II, Firefly Imageworks.
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The Lincoln Institute’s 2022 Journalists Forum brought together 30 reporters and editors on the climate beat for two days of conversation about the role of land in the climate crisis, highlighting the need for new ideas, innovations, and policies to help head off the worst impacts of global warming.
Land and land policy thread through just about every aspect of the crisis, whether deforestation, land conservation for carbon sequestration, the interplay of land, water, and agriculture, or the fact that usable land is disappearing, raising the important question of where millions of displaced people will go, now and in the future.
Meanwhile, powerful private market actors are at work, in many cases swooping in and buying land that will be prime and prized as flooding, wildfire, mudslides, and sea-level rise make other locations unlivable—a classic case of real estate speculation.
“We need to elevate . . . the understanding of the important role that land plays and will play in our ability to address this existential crisis. And if we get it wrong, we’’re going to leave a planet that’s very, very different for whomever is left to exist on it,” said George W. McCarthy, president of the Lincoln Institute, in this collection of highlights from the forum for the Land Matters podcast.
“And the big question is, are we prepared to? And can we navigate between the really, really powerful claims, private claims over dominion over land in exchange for the collective needs to use land differently to get to better global outcomes?” McCarthy asked. “Everything hangs in the balance.”
The journalists considered the intense competition for land, with the siting of solar and wind facilities, transmission pipelines, and other needs in the transition to net-zero emissions; emerging strategies in agriculture and the management of dwindling water resources; and current practices in land conservation, which make it possible for natural areas to continue to soak up carbon.
They also heard about how land can be used to pay for climate action, through land value capture—the harnessing of a portion of increases in private land values triggered by government investments in infrastructure—and the need for more coherent climate migration policies that take into account the vulnerable populations being forced to move from their homes.
The Journalists Forum also featured some practical tools to help cover the story of the century, led by Jeff Allenby of the Center for Geospatial Solutions and Peter Colohan from the Internet of Water initiative, both new Lincoln Institute programs. Advances in technology have enabled a real-time monitoring of land use changes and water flows, which serves as a critical foundation for planners and policymakers — and journalists for telling the story of this turbulent time.
The convening also included a discussion of the business of climate journalism itself, led by Nancy Gibbs, director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School; Andrew McCormick from the collaborative Covering Climate Now, Amrita Gupta from the Earth Journalism Network, and Trish Wilson, who established the first climate team dedicated to coverage of global warming at the Washington Post.
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
How to Fend Off Land Speculation (Land Lines)
Demands on the Land: To Secure a Livable Future, We Must Steward Land Wisely (Land Lines)
Return on Investment: Research Links Climate Action with Land and Property Value Increases (Land Lines)
Uprooted: As the Climate Crisis Forces U.S. Residents to Relocate, a New Conversation Emerges (Land Lines)
The Colorado River is in crisis, and it’s getting worse every day (The Washington Post)
How Can We Change Land Use at a Time of Climate Crisis and Competition? (RedAcción)
Deforestation Remains High, Despite International Pledges (New York Times)
Locals Worry Wind and Solar Will Gobble Up Forests and Farms (Stateline)
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.
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As the climate crisis grows ever more urgent, land conservationists are taking meaningful action to reduce carbon in the atmosphere and protect natural systems from the unavoidable impacts of a warming planet, according to a new report from the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.
From the Great Plains of the United States to the high-altitude wetlands of Ecuador, land trusts and conservancies are developing and implementing creative, nature-based strategies to address climate change. In the report From the Ground Up: How Land Trusts and Conservancies are Providing Solutions to Climate Change, Lincoln Institute experts James N. Levitt and Chandni Navalkha document these initiatives through a dozen case examples that demonstrate how conservation organizations can help mitigate and adapt to climate change.
“Such organizations are working in more than 100 nations on six continents,” write Levitt, director of the Lincoln Institute’s International Land Conservation Network, and Navalkha, the Lincoln Institute’s associate director of sustainably managed land and water resources. “They represent millions of engaged citizens working from Finland to Chile to pass our natural heritage on to future generations.”
The report explores how land trusts and conservancies have addressed climate change in five distinct areas, with examples of successful initiatives in each:
Among the cases, the report documents how The Nature Conservancy (TNC) is using sophisticated geospatial technology to identify sites in the United States where wind turbines will not pose a threat to birds or other wildlife. The initiative, Site Wind Right, draws on more than 100 sources to map wind resources, wildlife habitat, infrastructure, and other relevant data. It identifies more than 90 million acres as suitable for wind turbines—enough land to generate wind power equal to the country’s entire electricity supply from all sources in 2018.
Meanwhile, the South American capital city of Quito, Ecuador, has confronted threats to its water supply—made worse by climate change—through an ambitious land conservation program. The municipality worked with the local water provider and others to enhance water quality and supply downstream by conserving and better managing land upstream, in the high-altitude wetlands known as the Andean páramo, which surround the city. Through partnerships with international organizations, including TNC, the program has been replicated in at least seven other Latin American cities, generating more than USD $200 million for conservation efforts from 500 public and private partners.
Drawing on these cases and 10 others, Levitt and Navalkha synthesize lessons learned and make five recommendations for those who seek to confront climate change through land conservation: Empower civic sector initiatives that are creative and ambitious in scope and scale; invest in initiatives with clear strategies and measurable impact; aim for broad collaborations; share advanced science, technologies, and financing techniques; and think long term.
“In the evolving struggle to rein in and cope with climate change globally, all sectors must join forces to find solutions that are sustainable, replicable, and reliable,” the authors conclude.
Will Jason is director of communications at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.
Image: Flint Hills Credit: Brad Mangas
