Conservation Finance Roundtables

The New England Conservation Finance Roundtables bring together regional and national thinkers representing NGOs, foundations, investment advisors, state and federal agencies, universities and landowners to explore new strategies to confront a troubling upward trend in forest and farmland conversion to development coupled with slowing rates of land protection. Conservation finance is becoming one of the most exciting domains of innovative and strategic thinking and planning to address the conservation challenges and opportunities of our time.  

Highstead and The Conservation Finance Network convened leaders from NGOs, companies, foundations, and public agencies at the New England Conservation Finance Roundtable on February 24, 2021.

Hosted and moderated by Spencer Meyer, Senior Conservationist at Highstead, and Leigh Whelpton, Program Director at The Conservation Finance Network, the virtual gathering consisted of three sessions: Clean Water Investment, Natural Climate Solutions, and Healthy People and Communities. Together, the session panelists demonstrated how conservation and finance can align public and private investments to increase the equitable distribution of land conservation and stewardship benefits like clean air, clean water, public health, access to the outdoors, and climate change mitigation.

Over 200 attendees representing land trusts, public agencies, the private sector, NGOs, foundations, and academic institutions participated in the virtual session.

The goal of this roundtable was to capitalize on the region’s conservation capacity and the evolving national conservation finance dialogue by focusing on developing strategies that will: (1) accelerate the protection of forest and water resources, (2) incentivize sustainable production of food and fiber, (3) mitigate impacts from climate change, and (4) improve public health and rural economies.

The overarching themes embraced by this gathering—natural infrastructure investments; new public finance programs; healthy communities, healthy people; and working lands investments—were presented in the form of case studies and pitches to develop or cultivate focused effort on new mechanisms for advancing land conservation, followed by reflection, group discussion, and a “conservation hackathon” to brainstorm actionable ways to advance the most innovative and feasible options.

Highstead and Harvard Forest are now committed to working with our Wildlands and Woodlands Initiative partners to develop a selection of promising strategies—focused on both public and private finance—to inspire strong public support for land conservation, while incubating new public private conservation partnerships.