Harnessing Markets to Achieve Conservation
You might ask, if markets are the realm of profit, why is LegacyWorks creating conservation markets? We typically think of conservation and restoration as nonprofit activities funded through grants and philanthropy. Nonprofits are indeed critical to conservation efforts and have track records of protecting the resources we all care about. We should celebrate a landowner’s incredible generosity when they donate conservation easements, voluntarily restore habitat, or improve water usage on their lands. But if we only work with landowners who are willing and able to donate value, and on easements and restoration that we can fund via grants and gifts, we are working with a very small percentage of the overall ecosystem. What about when landowners cannot afford to undertake conservation measures and nonprofits are unable to raise funds to pay for them?
This is where markets come in. LegacyWorks develops market-based solutions that make financial sense for landowners to choose conservation. Here in the Tetons we have been working with farmers, ranchers and conservation groups to create conservation-based markets that enable landowners to generate financial value from their land by stewarding our region’s precious resources. As an example, think of a farmer selling potatoes at a farmers market. If people are willing to pay more for potatoes grown following conservation practices that are good for land, water and wildlife, that farmer is incentivized to follow those practices. Farming that way then makes more sense from a market-based perspective.
To support both the land and the people who steward it, LegacyWorks identifies areas where markets can improve conservation outcomes on private lands. Examples of our market-based initiatives include:
Building collaborative water markets in Idaho to incentivize aquifer recharge and improve water quality and instream flows for the benefit of local wildlife populations
Advancing certifications in Jackson Hole to enable landowners to choose less impactful lawn care practices and empower landscaping companies as engines of change
Helping barley farmers implement and certify regenerative practices that improve water quality in the Snake River system and command premium pricing for their crop
Piloting novel transactions to eliminate conflicts between elk and ranchers on winter range
In all these cases, our role as a nonprofit is to identify promising opportunities, raise funds to launch the market, and convene key players to create collaborative solutions. We then structure the market and pilot transactions to verify economic feasibility and conservation impact, refining the structure based on those real world results. New conservation markets can be complicated to launch and risky to private landowners and conservation groups. We de-risk market creation and prove out the benefits for all the players and the larger ecosystem, thereby forging new markets that will generate durable conservation outcomes. Best of all, these market-based solutions ultimately fund themselves.
