Conservation Capital In The Americas

The history of significant advances in conservation and environmental protection reflects ebbs and flows of activity. Over the past 150 years, the United States has seen opportunities arise to create landmark change in conservation and environmental policy and practice every 30 to 40 years. Now, as evidence of global warming becomes ever more undeniable, the entire international community seems poised to take meaningful action to achieve economic, social, and environmental security. In January 2009, more than 100 conservationists and policy makers assembled for a four-day conference on "Conservation Capital in the Americas." Attendees included senior executives of global conservation groups that had completed deals protecting hundreds of thousands of hectares, as well as first-year college students. The focus of their conversations is the heart of this book: How do we find the financial capital-as well as the human, social, and natural capital-to steward the earth's resources for this and future generations? Where do we find the money, the talent, and the political will to do the jobs necessary to address complex threats to ecosystems that provide a spectrum of essential services that sustain life? The answers to these questions are neither simple nor uniform. Carefully crafted solutions will need to fit a dizzying array of local land ownership patterns, political contexts, and economic conditions. New approaches to conservation finance, from the art of conservation deal-making to the practice of sustainable development, are being invented and implemented around the world every day. The case analyses that form the basis of this book are organized in pairs, with a case from North America and Latin America for each of the seven topics. This book is published by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy in collaboration with Island Press, the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at the Harvard Kennedy School, and the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University.