Topic: Land Protection

Building on the theme of natural climate solutions, this session will highlight several ways how conserving natural forest systems for climate mitigation also provides economic benefits to communities and the region.

Forests, wetlands, and agroecosystems are a critical component of natural climate solutions, yet a changing climate puts these ecosystems and the carbon they store at risk from a wide variety of stressors. Luckily, there is much land conservation practitioners can do to help these systems adapt to a changing climate. In this session, we will highlight the potential for synergies and win-wins between efforts to reduce climate change (mitigation) and prepare for and respond to climate change (adaptation) in the land conservation sector.

Land protection, whether public or private, is often controversial at the local level because residents worry about lost economic activity. Overall, this research provides novel evidence that land protection can be compatible with local economic growth and illustrate a method that can be broadly applied to assess the net economic impacts of protection

Short biographies of 2019 participants in the ALPINE Summer Institute