The Program On
Conservation Innovation
at The Harvard Forest, Harvard University

Publications

2009 Conference on Conservation Capital in the Americas

Report on the Conference on Conservation Capital in the Americas

In January of 2009 leaders of land conservation from across North and South America met in Valdavia, Chile to discuss innovative methods to fund conservation in the Western hemisphere. Among the topics they considered was the creation of conservation easements and land trusts in regions where no such instruments now exist.

Participants gathered at the Universidad Austral de Chile to focus on the best practices for bringing new sources of capital to the conservation of land and biodiversity. Among the 120 participants were public sector legislators and administrators, private entrepreneurs, non-profit experts in the practice of conservation, and professors and students from some 17 universities in North, Central and South America. Click here to read the conference report.

Now available: Report on the Woodlands and Wildlands Conservation Finance Roundtable

In April 2006, the Program on Conservation Innovation at the Harvard Forest convened more than three dozen experts in conservation finance from around the nation to consider innovative mechanisms for financing the Wildlands and Woodlands vision - a vision first articulated by David Foster and his colleagues in 2005.

The two-day working session, held at the Harvard University Center for the Environment in Cambridge, MA, yielded several highly inventive approaches to the challenge. You can download the Report on the W+W Conservation Finance Roundtable here.

In 2008 Foster and the Wildlands and Woodlands team met again to review the progress of their 2005 vision. They produced a follow-up report to track the developments since their original report.

2007-08 Conservation Leadership Dialogue on Conservation and Climate Change

2008 Report on Conservation and Climate Change

In May of 2008 the Lincoln Institute for Land Policy once again hosted a conference, this time in Washington DC, to discuss primarily “how the land and biodiversity conservation community can effectively devise and implement effective adaptive management strategies to address the ongoing impacts of climate change on conservation land and water resources, as well as agriculture and rural communities.” Read more of the report.

The primary coordinators of the event, Jim Levitt and Charles Chester wrote the follow-up essay on the 2008 conference discussed below:

Conservation and Climate Change: The Immediate Need to Adapt
James N. Levitt and Charles C. Chester, Fall 2008

• Climate change is not just an impending problem that will effect generations to come. It is already taking its toll on both coastal and semi-arid regions around the globe. Scientists and policy makers are working fervently to address these issues before they grow any more, but more work needs to be done to adapt to imminent changes. Levitt and Chester discuss the work that has already been done, and the steps our society must take in order to ensure a stable future in the face of a changing climate. The article was published in Innovations, a quarterly journal published by the MIT press, in Fall 2008.

2007 Report on Conservation and Climate Change

In June 2007 the Lincoln Institute for Land Policy hosted a workshop in Cambridge, Massachusetts focusing on the development of adaptive management strategies for mitigating climate change. Read about the challenges climate change presents and the adaptive management strategies that the workshop participants developed over the three-day conference in The Report on Conservation and Climate Change.

Report on Conservation Finance Intermediaries

In March, 2007 the Program on Conservation Innovation at the Harvard Forest convened a group of conservation finance experts from around the nation to consider the present status and prospects for conservation finance intermediary organizations that help to connect a wide variety of financing sources with deserving land protection initiatives, typically on a regional basis. The report on this meeting, available here, features the insights of more than two dozen senior executives and subject experts active in the field.

The American Conservation Tradition and the Land Trust Alliance
James N. Levitt, Fall 2007

• The Land Trust Alliance published a special report for its 25th anniversary in 2007 entitled “A Report on the Future of Land Conservation in America” highlighting a few leaders in conservation. One of these leaders was Jim Levitt, Director of the Program on Conservation Innovation, who wrote an essay about how America not only has a strong tradition of conservation that is often ignored today, but it actually spearheaded the conservation movement around the globe. From the founding of the Boston Commons, to the creation of Yellowstone, the first ever national park, the United States has been a model for the rest of the world in the field of land conservation and should continue to fulfill that role.

Conservation via Satellite: Leveraging Remote Sensing to Monitor the Pingree Easement

• Click here for access to an article by Jim Levitt regarding the satellite technology-enabled monitoring protocol used by the New England Forestry Foundation to monitor the 762,000 acre Pingree conservation easement in northern Maine. The article appears in the new MIT Press journal, Innovations: Technology/Governance/Globalization, Volume 1, Number 2, Spring 2006.

Conservative Incentives in America's Heartland
James N. Levitt, October 2006

• Levitt’s insightful article on the need for fiscal and market-based incentives, especially with regards to agricultural runoff in America’s rivers and streams, was published in the Lincoln Institute for Land Policy’s quarterly journal, Land Lines. Currently, the water of the Mississippi is so polluted with fertilizer runoff and other pollutants that the Gulf of Mexico’s waters have become hypoxic at the mouth of the river, making it impossible for life to exist in the area. In order to address these problems in a serious way, we can no longer simply depend on command-and-control policies that provide no incentives for the average farmer in the Midwest and Western United States to follow them. The most efficient and effective way to control the growing issue of eutrophication in our rivers would be to give the agricultural sector incentives to stop allowing fertilizer runoff to enter streams.

From Walden to Wall Street: Frontiers of Conservation Finance.
James N. Levitt, editor. 2005. Island Press and Lincoln Institute.

• From Walden to Wall Street brings together the experience of more than a dozen pioneering conservation finance practitioners to present groundbreaking ideas for dramatically expanding the availability of capital for land and biodiversity conservation in the United States. The authors explore a wide array of promising opportunities, including: mainstreaming environmental markets; enhancing government ballot measures for land conservation; using new forms of tax-advantaged financing; and leveraging the power of private debt and equity markets.
  
  In the absence of such innovations in the field of conservation finance, a daunting funding gap faces conservationists aiming to protect America's system of landscapes that provide sustainable resources, water, wildlife habitat, and recreational amenities. Experts estimate that the average annual funding gap will be between $1.9 billion and $7.7 billion over the next forty years. The creativity and insight of From Walden to Wall Street offers considerable hope that, even in this era of widespread financial constraints, the American conservation community's financial resources may potentially grow dramatically in both quantity and quality coming decades.
  
  James N. Levitt directs the Program on Conservation Innovation at the Harvard Forest and is a research fellow at the Ash Institute for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.

Landscape-Scale Conservation: Grappling with the Green Matrix
James N. Levitt, January 2004.

• In June of 2003, with support from the Lincoln Institute for Land Policy at Harvard University, the U.S. National Park Service Conservation Study Institute (NPS CSI), the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy (GGNPC), and the Quebec-Labrador Foundation (QLF), more than two dozen senior executives of private, non-profit, academic, and public sector organizations convened at the Presidio of San Francisco for a two-day conference to advance the understanding of landscape-scale conservation efforts.  This article appeared in Land Lines, the quarterly newsletter of the Lincoln Institute for Land Policy, and summarizes the discussions and findings of the conference participants.

Introduction to the Next Level: The Pingree Forest Partnership as a Private Lands Conservation Innovation
James N. Levitt, September 2003.

• The Pingree Forest Partnership, a multi-year effort spear-headed by the New England Forestry Foundation to acquire a permanent conservation easement on 762,192 acres of privately-owned forestland in the state of Maine, stands out as an important conservation innovation.  Conservationists are striving to transfer several of the innovative aspects of the Pingree project to new initiatives in North America and around the world.

Conservation in the Internet Age: Threats and Opportunities
Edited by James N. Levitt, with an introduction by Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack, October 2002.

• Conservation in the Internet Age, published by Island Press, offers a cross-disciplinary analysis of critical changes on the land and in the field of conservation.  Contributors include leading scholars and practitioners in the fields of land and biodiversity conservation.  The book examines the links among land use, technology, and conservation from multiple perspectives and suggests areas and initiatives that merit further investigation.  The associated web site offers links to additional information and resources.

Land and Biodiversity Conservation: A Leadership Dialogue
James N. Levitt, July 2002

• This article appeared in Land Lines, the quarterly newsletter of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.  It summarizes the discussions and findings of a group of two dozen eminent conservationists who met at the Lincoln Institute in March, 2002, to consider the grand challenges facing the North American land and biodiversity conservation community in the twenty-first century.

Conservation Innovation in America: Past Present, and Future
James N. Levitt, December 2002

• This paper analyzes the distinct subset of American conservation innovations based on the criteria of novelty, significance, effectiveness, transferability, and ability to endure.  It also recognizes the challenges twenty-first century conservationists are facing in order to bring forth a new generation of landmark innovations commensurate with the considerable threats to open space and biodiversity we now face.

The Report on Conservation Innovation

- Second Quarter 2009
- First Quarter 2009
- Fourth Quarter 2008
- Third Quarter 2008
- Second Quarter 2008
- First Quarter 2008
- Fourth Quarter 2007
- Third Quarter 2007
- Second Quarter 2007
- First Quarter 2007
- Fall Followup 2006
- Fall 2006
- Summer 2006
- Spring 2006
- Fall 2005
- Fall 2004
- Spring 2004
- Fall 2003
- Winter / Spring 2003
- Spring / Summer 2002
- Fall / Winter 2001-2002
- Spring 2001

• With this publication (the RCI), we aim to provide updates into the life of the Program on Conservation Innovation at the Harvard Forest, Harvard University.  In addition, through interviews and profiles, we highlight the work of policymakers, researchers, and conservation professionals who are striving to be effective stewards of natural resources and amenities in the twenty-first century.  The RCI pays particular regard to two groups: notable innovators who, with the use of connective networks that were only imagined a decade ago, are helping to constructively "change the game" in the fields of land and biodiversity conservation; and researchers who are documenting the rapidly changing and potentially disruptive demographic and land use patterns in the Internet Age.
• To be added to the distribution list for these PDF reports, please sent a request via e-mail to Jim Levitt at james_levitt@harvard.edu.