Advancing the Implementation of Conservation Planning
The Environmental Law Institute’s Conservation Thresholds Program seeks to execute and coordinate a set of implementation strategies designed to advance the success of conservation planning. To date, our Conservation Thresholds Program been supported by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, George Gund Foundation, H.M. Jackson Foundation, Johnson Foundation, Surdna Foundation, and an individual donor.
Background
For the vast majority of threatened or endangered species, habitat loss and fragmentation are the major causes of their imperilment as well as the most significant threats to their conservation. Through their planning and local regulatory powers, land use planners and local elected officials influence the types, extent, and arrangement of land use, which can have a profound influence on the viability of biodiversity far beyond municipal boundaries. Conservation planning is the development of biologically defensible plans that maintain natural habitat in the amount, pattern, and quality safely above the threshold at which native species begin to decline precipitously. ELI seeks to help make landscape scale conservation planning more commonplace and proactive.
Conservation Thresholds for Land Use Planners
In 2003, ELI released Conservation Thresholds for Land Use Planners, a review and synthesis of information from the scientific literature to provide basic thresholds to land use planners to rely upon when making decisions affecting biodiversity. The report provides concrete targets for planners to use when making decisions about how much land to protect, the adequate size and location of habitat corridors, widths for riparian buffers, and maximum supportable distances between separate habitat patches. The conservation thresholds recommended in our publication have been used extensively across the country in land use plans, regulations, and standards.
Lasting Landscapes
In 2006, ELI turned to nine of the leading thinkers in the land use planning, conservation biology, and conservation policy professions to reflect upon the role of his/her respective profession in promoting the use of science-based information in land use planning. Their thought-provoking essays, published in Lasting Landscapes: Reflections on the Role of Conservation Science in Land Use Planning (2007), make it clear that a more intentional approach to conservation planning is needed.
Conservation Thresholds Wingspread Conference
Our conference at the Wingspread Conference Center brought together an historic assemblage of leaders from the land use planning, conservation biology, and conservation policy professions, as well as prominent academics from these fields. The conference was designed to identify concrete implementation strategies that support the integration of conservation biology principles into land use planning — and it succeeded in doing just that.
The Next Steps
The priorities outlined in Lasting Landscapes and refined at the Conservation Thresholds Wingspread conference will serve as our roadmap for advancing the implementation of conservation planning. Throughout this initiative, ELI will partner with local, regional, and national groups and associations as we execute and coordinate the following implementation strategies.
- Support interdisciplinary research on effective conservation planning
- Support research on the economic and political incentives for conservation planning
- Develop a best practice primer to support proactive conservation planning
- Develop a conservation planning communications toolkit
- Engage in outreach to environmental professionals
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