2023 Schedule – Pacific Time

Through the USDA Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities Program, the New England Forestry Foundation (NEFF) is anchoring a nationally relevant pilot program in New England to demonstrate how well-managed forests and sustainably harvested wood products can address climate change while supporting biodiversity and benefiting both rural and urban stakeholders. With support from this program, small landowners and land trusts will be empowered to help implement this vision,showcasing how the values of long-term land conservation can work in concert with climate-smart forest management on private forest lands. This will include refining the definition of “climate-smart” forest management, implementing climate-smart practices via foresters and loggers and generating measurable climate benefits in the form of increased carbon sequestration and storage. A central aspect of this project is a collaboration with the Family Forest Carbon Program (a project of the American Forest Foundation and the Nature Conservancy) to inform and enroll smaller forest landowners. In addition, NEFF will conduct several landowner outreach pilot efforts in strategic geographies throughout New England that will focus on reaching underserved landowners in local wood baskets and offer training to the loggers and foresters that landowners (including land trusts) depend on to implement sound forest management. This workshop will frame how regional partnerships are key to implementing the landscape-scale goals of this project, including the value of strong engagement from land trusts.

In a presentation and interactive discussion format, this session will feature three experts in solar project planning, energy policy and stakeholder engagement to discuss that latest in renewable energy site mapping, best practices for project co-benefits (including stormwater management) and strategies to make solar more compatible with natural and working lands protection. With this information, land trusts can confidently engage in local and project-level discussions leading to more beneficial outcomes, such as solar projects that protect water quality, enhance biodiversity and integrate regenerative soil health practices.

Trees provide many essential benefits to human communities, wildlife and the environment. In recent years, their capacity to store carbon has been gaining global attention as one of the mechanisms to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. However, the prohibitively high costs of project development, monitoring, reporting and verification have previously prevented land trusts from participating in the voluntary carbon market. City Forest Credits (CFC), a national nonprofit carbon registry, is offering a solution by exclusively registering and issuing credits from metropolitan-associated forest projects. CFC’s carbon crediting process offers a systems and accountability approach that ensures high-quality urban forest projects and long-term revenue for land trusts. CFC provides a way for land trusts, local governments and other entities that manage urban forests to finance conservation projects that contribute to the health and well-being of people and the environment. Western Reserve Land Conservancy (WRLC) has completed four projects protecting over 344 acres of forests of Northeast Ohio yielding over 44,475 credits and directly benefit communities in its service area. This synergistic work aligns with WRLC’s mission to protect essential natural assets for thriving and prosperous communities and opens an additional funding stream to support its local conservation and restoration work. In this session, participants will learn about the emerging opportunities for land trusts to generate significant financial resources from forest preservation carbon projects on lands over 15 acres that are in or near metropolitan areas.

Carbon markets offer emerging possibilities to conserve working forestlands, reduce atmospheric carbon and provide financing for natural climate solutions. However, as demand increases for these projects, so do questions around their efficacy in fighting climate change, as well as concerns around whether they will be used to reduce overall timber volume and create unintended consequences for rural communities and sustainable building material supply chains. The Washington Department of Natural Resources (DNR) knows firsthand both the excitement and concerns that come up as more entities, including DNR itself, dive into this world. Washington’s DNR has launched a first-of-its-kind carbon project, released a “Carbon Playbook” outlining the many ways in which carbon projects could help the agency reach its conservation and management goals and advocated for agency request legislation for DNR to have clear authority to directly enter into carbon markets itself. Over the course of this workshop, representatives from the agency, including the statewide elected Commissioner of Public Lands, will share information about each of these three elements, including the concerns we heard along the way from stakeholders from every end of the spectrum. Then, we’ll turn it over to the participants: what strategies would you put in place to operationalize carbon projects on DNR lands that meet multiple objectives—conserve working forestland, reduce atmospheric carbon and seek financing for natural climate solutions and other critical natural resource management?

Healthy tidal marshes provide valuable social and ecological benefits, including improved water quality, protection from storm surge, aesthetic value and critical habitat for both rare and commercially important species. Traditional approaches to tidal marsh conservation have focused significantly on the protection of the marsh features themselves, and management activities that often focused on a single species/taxa. The current era of rapid climate changes demands a more integrative approach to marsh conservation that considers the impacts of sea level rise, protection of upland buffers to allow for marsh migration, and restoration to correct for human impacts (ie. salt hay farming). In Downeast Maine, several land trusts are using this integrative approach and are regionally leading salt marsh conservation in a uniquely collaborative way. Using examples from active salt marsh restoration projects, each at a different stage in the process, we will share the iterative conservation planning process we used to assess threats to tidal marshes in the region and identify strategies for resiliency. We will discuss the importance of gaining community support, funding and shared positions, and effective two-way communication with private landowners, local communities, researchers and state and federal agencies. The majority of salt marshes in eastern Maine are privately owned and of little real estate market value, which poses a challenge for conducting restoration projects and incentivizing landowners to participate. We will discuss solutions we have identified, how our approach has shifted over time and share lessons learned from the collaborative approach we are using to conserve and restore salt marshes in the region.

To keep the family farm, Jack's Solar Garden was built in 2020 in Boulder County, Colorado. It is a 1.2 MW (4 acre) solar array elevated higher than normal to accommodate people, trucks, tractors, animals and vegetation. It is now a national model for integrating agricultural practices within a solar array including research into ecosystem services and grassland ecology conducted by local universities. This session details how and why this solar array was built, the finances around it, the research findings on how solar panels reduce irrigation needs for vegetables and grasses, and showcases the possibilities of integrating solar on working and conservation easement lands. Attendees will takeaway a new appreciation for how solar arrays can be built for the betterment of lands instead of at its detriment.

Over the last two years, Congress has passed historic provisions for climate and conservation in the Great American Outdoors Act (GAOA), Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) and the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). So what happens now? How can state and local organizations like land trusts and conservation alliances help leverage this legislation to support impactful projects, and share stories of success? This session will profile lessons learned and best practices for how organizations can educate key influencers about the benefits of GAO /IIJA / IRA, and advocate for local measures to support their implementation. Participants will have the opportunity to workshop scenarios for how they and their organizations could approach potential opportunities for engagement.

This session builds on the success of land trusts’ advocacy for full permanent funding of the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF), to explore new opportunities for partnership using this critical program for conservation that meets the current moment of climate crisis and persistent disparities in access to nature for underserved communities. We will present new pathways for collaborative projects using full permanent funding of LWCF opened up by the Biden Administration’s efforts to advance its America the Beautiful initiative, and examples of how LWCF advances climate and equity goals. The America the Beautiful initiative recognizes what we in the conservation community have long known: land is our greatest asset in the fight against climate change. The Administration is committed to natural climate solutions and to equitable access to nature, using the tools in the LWCF toolbox. This is evidenced by the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 which committed an additional $750M to the LWCF-funded Forest Legacy Program and by the largest-ever grant round for the Outdoor Recreation Legacy Partnership Program announced by the Administration with key changes to empower greater partnership with diverse communities. We will present models for success using the LWCF toolbox to increase landscape connectivity, keep forests as forests for carbon sequestration and water storage/quality, partner with Tribal communities and provide more and better quality parks that increase climate resilience in places that have been left underserved.

With increasing frequency and severity of coastal hazards across the country, the need for innovative resilience infrastructure continues to grow. Nature-based solutions are becoming preferred infrastructure practices due to their ability to increase the resilience of both human and wildlife communities. Finding common ground and building consensus among key stakeholders provides the means necessary to pave the way for deploying these practices. Likewise, obtaining a comprehensive understanding of the landscape within and beyond the boundaries of preserved properties goes a long way towards the holistic stewardship at the watershed level. This session will be discussing the Kiawah Conservancy's efforts to engage with stakeholders in their community to address barriers to coastal resilience by building a consensus on nature-based solutions and developing guidance documents. Additionally, this session will also discuss how we are using geospatial techniques and collaborative efforts to develop implementation strategies within the Kiawah River Watershed.

We all know that the land we protect forever won’t look the same forever. From habitat shift and meandering streams to extreme weather events, wildfires, and sea level rise, the conditions we captured in our baseline report are not likely to be the same conditions even a few years later. In this workshop, we will share case studies of how Sonoma County Ag + Open Space is using GIS and remote sensing data related to climate change impacts—in particular wildfire risk, flood risk, sea level rise, and drought—in strategic planning, conservation easement design, and easement stewardship. We will showcase local and California statewide data, as well as alternate free or low-cost resources.

Duke Farms is a 2,700-acre center for environmental stewardship in Hillsborough, NJ, that restores the natural environment, invests in sustainability innovation while offering visitors free inclusive and accessible resources for finding their place in nature. In this interactive workshop, we will detail tools that Duke Farms has used to integrate sustainability into operations. Duke Farms has used these tools to successfully minimize our carbon footprint, reduce waste and maximize use of renewable energy sources. We will also focus on operational sustainability goals of the participants. Participants will develop a draft plan to assess climate and environmental impact of their operations, develop sustainability goals and identify resources to assist them on their sustainability journey.

The Columbia River Gorge Commission (CRGC) is a bi-state commission that works to establish, implement and enforce policies and programs that protect and enhance the scenic, natural, recreational and cultural resources of the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area (NSA). CRGC’s territory overlaps with the accredited Friends of the Columbia Gorge. The CRGC adopted its first climate plan,the Climate Change Action Plan (CCAP), in 2022, after more than a year of effort collaborating with tribes, regional partners and the public. One of many strategies adopted in the CCAP is centered around protection of High Climate Resilience Areas. Throughout the development of the CCAP, Friends and CRGC worked in a highly collaborative fashion to share GIS data and make recommendations for land protection goals. The end result is a shared set of geographic priorities centered around climate resilience for both the CRGC and Friends. Community outreach was also a critical aspect of developing the CCAP, and another area of collaboration between the two groups. Friends helped with outreach by connecting CRGC staff with leaders, community groups and communications forums to the local Latino community. This included a series of workshops and listening sessions focused on simplifying and translating the complexities of the CCAP for these audiences. CRGC also actively worked with tribal partners to focus on First Foods and cultural resource protection. The session will share information on our approach, lessons learned and the value that land trusts can bring to agency climate planning.

Conservation has been primarily focused on the protection of places so that they can stay the way that they've been in the past, for decades, or for the past hundreds, or thousands of years. But climate impacts will fundamentally change some of these places and how they function over time. This session will help you understand where in the landscape the land will most likely retain the important features that will benefit future ecological integrity, and future generations of our human communities. This presentation will be a thorough and instructive review of an analysis conducted together by two neighboring land trusts and a GIS contractor. Based on the best available data (including The Nature Conservancy's Conserving Nature’s Stage and Resilient and Connected Network data), and resulting in a series of priority opportunity areas, the analysis provides a new focus for communities preparing for the shifting climate conditions and provides a template for other land trusts and communities to follow. We will review how resilient lands were assessed across four main pillars of work that the two land trusts are committed to: habitat and biodiversity, working farms, working forests and community. Implementation of the analysis through land trust practices and community engagement will also be described.

Land trusts have a major role to play in addressing the climate crisis. Across the U.S. there are carbon-rich forests that are vulnerable to development, wildfire and a host of other threats. These lands must be protected. This session will explore how land trusts can effectively and efficiently identify these carbon-rich landscapes and then evaluate, at the parcel level, the carbon impact of conservation – now and into the future. Presenters will teach attendees how to navigate existing datasets and two publicly available online tools that can be used to create sophisticated carbon data analyses for any parcel or region in the lower 48 states. Presenters will also highlight use cases and examples of easement terms and management plan guidelines that can be used to improve carbon storage and sequestration. Lastly, we will discuss how carbon data can help build successful applications for new federal funds, including the $700 million Forest Legacy program. This session will be highly interactive and feedback from attendees will help shape future data and tool development being led by a host of national NGOs and the USFS. Note that this session is meant to support advancing forest carbon goals outside of carbon markets and will not discuss market trends.

The Sonoma Valley Wildlands Collaborative is a partnership between state, county and nonprofit land management organizations, working to improve wildfire resilience across 18,000 acres of public and private lands. Formed after the 2017 North Bay wildfires, our work is focused on fuel management and forest resilience projects, but the magic is the model of partnership. Built on consensus decision-making and a Memorandum of Agreement, the partnership provides opportunities for larger and more flexible funding streams, improved coordination and stakeholder engagement and resource sharing. Sonoma Land Trust is a member of the Collaborative, and acts as administrative lead on grant procurement and management. Since inception, we have received $3 million in state and foundation grants, and sped up the pace and scale of work in the region through coordination and capacity building. The flexibility of the land trust structure, in particular the ability to provide innovative financial and contract arrangements, allows this partnership to be more productive together than each of us can be on our own. The Collaborative is focused around wildfire recovery and resilience, but the structure and lessons from this session can be adapted and applied to conservation land challenges in any region or ecosystem.