How Relationships Catalyzed Conservation Innovation in Australia: Reflections and a Report on Australian Participation at the 2024 ILCN Global Congress

By Cecilia Riebl

In October 2024, 260 conservationists from 26 countries convened in Beaupré, Canada, at the 2024 ILCN Global Congress to share knowledge and develop solutions around the Congress theme, “relationships for a resilient world.” Among these participants were 14 Australian land conservation practitioners for whom the event spurred learning and reflection on the trajectory of a global private and civic land conservation network that has experienced impressive growth in the past decade.

The 2024 ILCN Global Congress, co-hosted by the Nature Conservancy of Canada (NCC), welcomed guests from the non-profit, academic, business, Indigenous, and government sectors to share, imagine, and act across five focus areas: conservation finance, organization and governance, law and policy, land stewardship and management, and large landscape conservation.

Australian participants represented land trusts, Indigenous alliances, biodiversity-market startups, academia, environmental NGOs, global investment managers, innovative land managers, and the nation’s peak private land conservation body, the Australian Land Conservation Alliance (ALCA). Their presence and insights drew on a plethora of knowledge that has emerged amidst the unprecedented advancement of the past decade.

Where it began

Ten years ago, the concept of private and civic land conservation was not a mainstream idea on a global scale. However, there was a growing consensus that privately protected areas deserved far greater recognition and support. The Land Trust Alliance and the Australian Land Conservation Alliance co-hosted international roundtables on private land conservation in 2012 and 2013 that helped identify practitioners, organizations, and networks advancing private and civic land conservation around the world who were interested in coming together to share knowledge and address common challenges.  

Recognizing the need to better understand the practice of private land conservation in the United States and around the globe, Laura Johnson, past president of the Massachusetts Audubon Society and a lifelong conservationist, wrote the 2014 Lincoln Institute of Land Policy working paper “An Open Field: Emerging Opportunities for a Private Land Conservation Movement.” The paper described the need and opportunity for an international network of private land conservation organizations and practitioners.

At a 2014 charter meeting hosted by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy that brought together 30 international leaders in private land conservation, the ILCN was founded.

This moment helped catalyze an era of rapid change in the practice of land conservation and enabled new possibilities for knowledge sharing and cross-border collaboration. From this grew several regional conservation networks, including Eurosite—the European Land Conservation Network (ELCN).

A decade later, participants at the fourth ILCN Global Congress referred often to a global private and civic land conservation movement. This movement, though long percolating in national and regional silos, did not exist on an international scale just a few years back. In Australia, the impacts of this movement are clear and traceable, most notably, to a few areas of growth.

Relating, networking, and collaborating

Throughout the Congress, speakers and participants reflected on the importance of relationships in achieving effective conservation outcomes. For years, conservationists focused primarily on relationships with landholders. Kathleen Fitzgerald, project director of Enduring Earth for the Pew Charitable Trusts, challenged guests to expand this definition to include “radical partnerships.” This includes businesses, First Peoples, primary producers, banks, governments, and others.

In Australia, both emerging and well-established initiatives are increasingly leaning into these types of innovative partnerships. A 2022 case study of the environmental organization Greening Australia explores the impact of its partnership with businesses to bring nature-based solutions to fruition across the nation and in collaboration with government. Organizations like Bush Heritage Australia have built their models around collaboration with First Nations. And Australia’s Nature Repair Act 2023 paves the way for a nature repair marketplace that aims to monetize the contributions of individuals and organizations across sectors who protect and restore biodiversity, through business participation and private investment in conservation.

Building global networks

Relationships and partnerships such as these are supported, in turn, by local, national, and global networks that all work to complement each other as critical relationship-building tools. The growth of ALCA illustrates this, as the now-19-member, formally incorporated alliance began as an informal coalition of land trusts in 2011 and grew to what it is today in just 13 years.

“[Today], private land conservation has shifted from a collection of individual conservation organizations across the country to an increasingly cohesive, sophisticated and mutually supportive movement,” said ALCA CEO, Jody Gunn. “Through increased capacity and resources, ALCA has been able to achieve meaningful education and advocacy outcomes and is a trusted policy voice at the national and state level.”

Global audiences now also turn to ALCA’s insights and expertise, including at recent Biodiversity COPs. Its growth was catalyzed by the many joined hands that pushed it forth, as its trajectory was partly informed and amplified by the ILCN, which has grown alongside it since 2014.

Like an ecosystem, national networks rely on a myriad of smaller more localized networks to operate well. Victoria Marles, Chair of ALCA, moderated a panel discussion at Congress that explored the status of emerging networks in key continents around the world, their achievements and impacts, and the strategic role they are playing in strengthening land conservation efforts in African, Latin American, and East Asian contexts. She said that “people and organizations in the conservation sector want to be part of networks. They appreciate that they are central to scaling conservation.”

Learning together

Networks are also a powerful approach to enabling peer learning, a necessary tool for supporting positive conservation outcomes. Successful networks are built on collaboration, knowledge sharing, and practical skill development among people who all have something to bring to the table.

Cecilia Riebl, the ILCN’s regional representative for Australasia shared an example of this in a panel discussion. In 2022, the US-based Global Landscape Stewards (GLS) Network traveled to Australia to explore solutions to shared conservation challenges, including fire, drought and Indigenous partnership.

For a program like this to be a success, Riebl said, “there needs to be human connection.” She explained that this means helping everyone understand the purpose of the learning that is happening and appreciating each other’s shared challenges and priorities. People also come together around problem solving, both on the ground and by spending unstructured time together in a way that deepens their relationships.

Riebl also highlighted the importance of continuity, which she defined as “connecting with each other before and after a key peer-learning experience, following up on key challenges and taking ideas forward.” Finally, effective peer learning requires collaborative leadership, which Riebl described as “an attitude to learning that requires a willingness to leave your silo and work together on challenges that go beyond your team, sector, even country, and take responsibility for the whole picture.”

Partnering to close the finance gap

Voluntary Biodiversity Markets

“We all know the enormous conservation finance gap we face,” said Candice Stevens, founder and CEO of the Sustainable Finance Coalition, in her introduction to the Congress Roundtable on Biodiversity Credits. “The biggest question is how we’re going to plug that gap. And that is not just about increasing the amount of finance available, it’s ensuring that it is targeted at the point of impact and reaches the people and places that need it most.”

Biodiversity credits are one tool for financing voluntary conservation and are showing up in emerging markets around the world. Wilderlands is Australia’s first voluntary biodiversity credit provider and highlights the opportunities as well as the challenges of working in this space.

The Wilderlands model is based on a rigorous system that ensures permanent protection, ongoing management, and independent registration of biodiversity credits. In partnership with Traditional Owners, Wilderlands manages four conservation properties, representing diverse ecosystems in South-Eastern Australia, and sells 1×1 meter biodiversity units from those properties that businesses and consumers can track via a personalized profile. This allows Wilderlands to work with the business sector—from property owners to state festivals to beauty brands—to bring private land conservation into the mainstream, and provide a simple model for disclosing nature impacts.

Despite their buzz, biodiversity markets face significant challenges. “We are still asking business to invest in nature for nature’s sake,” said Ash Knop, Wilderlands CEO. Frameworks like the Taskforce for Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) are critical for increasing business awareness and fluency around nature impacts and dependencies, but “until there are mandated actions on goals, companies are not going to move. We are looking for leadership.”

Tim Male, executive director of Yale University’s Environmental Policy Innovation Center suggested Australia keep a close eye on Europe for that leadership, where mandated cross-sector action comes from government-level policy engagement. Europe’s Corporate sustainability laws and newly passed Nature Restoration Law exemplify this. Together, Male called them “the new frontier of environmental regulation.”

Navigating permanence in the race to 30×30

The future of on title permanent protection

Australia must rapidly expand privately protected areas (PPAs) if it is to deliver on its 30×30 promises. PPAs protect conservation value on private land via in-perpetuity, on-title agreements with private landholders—also called covenants—or through land owned by conservation land trusts. Sarah Brugler, a PhD candidate for the Faculty of Law at the University of Tasmania, dove into these options in a panel discussion on permanence in conservation agreements.

Australia has one of the largest PPA networks in the world, in part enabled by an effective National Reserve System program that ran between 1996 and 2007 and a rigorous science based approach to protection that requires comprehensiveness, adequacy, and representativeness (CAR) to be eligible.

While this system has served conservation well, Brugler said, “we are at a crossroads.” To meet the requirements of 30×30, a range of new and adaptive private land conservation tools are emerging. Leaders will need to innovate permanent protection instruments like covenants to leverage carbon and nature markets, and allow them to be integrated into an increasingly diverse and complex system. When honing tools such as covenants, conservationists must ensure the tools’ unwavering integrity, while maintaining their flexibility and inclusivity.

“We have a lot to learn from other approaches internationally,” Brugler said. “In the United States, agricultural easements are ubiquitous, securing natural resources, open space, and sustainable land practices. The Australian system could learn from this model.”

Conserved Areas: Long term biodiversity management outside of protected areas

Other area-based conservation measures (OECMs, also known as Conserved Areas) are another prominent tool emerging internationally. The International Union for Conservation of Nature defines these as “areas that are achieving the long term and effective in-situ conservation of biodiversity outside of protected areas.” OECMs present an opportunity to give greater recognition to areas that are important for biodiversity but where formal protected area designation is not possible or appropriate. Such areas may include defense lands, water catchments, biodiversity offsets, and carbon farming projects.

As part of a panel on assessing and implementing OECMs, James Fitzsimons, senior advisor of global protection strategies at The Nature Conservancy, acknowledged the opportunities presented by OECMs, including better recognition of lands with important biodiversity values that are delivering (or likely to deliver) long-term biodiversity outcomes. But, he said, “it hasn’t all been smooth sailing [in Australia].”

The two key elements of a meaningful OECM are longevity and effectiveness. According to Australia’s recently released National OECM Framework, OECMs must have a lifespan of at least 99 years. This reverses a previous draft plan which proposed to allow land to qualify as an OECM if there was simply an ‘intent’ to manage for conservation for 25 years, at odds with international guidance. Effectiveness, while a more ambiguous term, essentially refers to the OECM’s actual conservation impact. Fitzsimons explained that OECMs cannot be, “protected areas lite”.

In that same vein, Courtney Robertson, manager of the Canadian Government’s protected and conserved areas recognition unit, highlighted the need for OECMs to be tied to incentives in some situations. “We will need to find alignment with existing programs, including carbon markets and sustainable industry certifications, finding a home for projects that don’t currently fit into existing funding programs for protected areas,” said Robertson, adding that effective storytelling will also help enable OECM growth.

Putting policy into practice: Agricultural and Indigenous partnerships for conservation

In a conference setting, the breadth of ideas, challenges, and emerging solutions are sometimes best illustrated using examples of where they are being implemented successfully. All of what was circulated during the Congress is rooted in work that is already being done on the ground. The environmental not-for-profit Odonata is an example of these best practices coalescing to effectively and sustainably protect land.

For more than two decades, Odonata has worked to create world-class sanctuary standards that permanently protect and successfully breed some of Australia’s most threatened species, including the Eastern Barred Bandicoot, the Southern Brush-tailed Rock-wallaby, and the Eastern Quoll. 

“We are bringing Australian species that have been classified ‘extinct in the wild’ back from the brink. This is a first,” said Odonata founder, Nigel Sharp. Sharp is an Australian conservationist first and a businessperson second – the latter providing the means through which he has implemented and scaled solutions to protected area management.

Several of Odonata’s threatened species sanctuaries also co-exist with, and support, primary production. “These threatened species are important soil engineers,” said Sharp. Animals like bandicoots are critical to ecosystem balance and have helped restore soil health and manage runoff and erosion during heavy rain events. “This shows how critically important our native fauna are to our ecosystems, and by extension to our farming systems.”

With the support of impact investors, Odonata purchased two properties that are being converted to regenerative farming. Odonata developed a training program, Odonata academy, which helps landholders farm sustainably and establish threatened species sanctuaries on their land.

Importantly, Odonata works alongside First Nations across all its programs. For example, “Eastern Maar Traditional Owners were actively involved in releasing Eastern quolls back onto Country, in partnership with Odonata. This is significant because these species are totemic to this Traditional Owner group and it’s the first time quolls have been returned to this country since they disappeared decades ago. It’s quite moving”, says Sharp.

He shared that, in Western Australia, Odonata has worked alongside Esperance Tjaltjraak Native Title Aboriginal Corporation to ensure Odonata’s farming operation is First Nations-led. This leads to more employment opportunities and improved outcomes for health and self-determination among First Nations people. He explained that, “supporting First Nations groups to own and manage freehold land in Australia is absolutely critical as it enables those groups to return to and care for Country, whilst also exercising their economic rights.”

Final reflections

For those who have been doing this work for decades, it is exciting and humbling to look back at the progress that has been made and to see that what exists today is, truly, a global movement. It became clear at the 2024 ILCN Global Congress that this movement was built on positive relationships. In turn, those relationships are rooted in humanity: in finding connection, establishing community, coalescing disparate interests, and listening carefully.

During an opening ceremony at the Congress, Diane Picard, an Elder of the Huron-Wendat Nation shared the wisdom that caring for land is about people, friendships, and “nonhwe” – love. Love for land, love for the intricate systems that enable life on earth, and love for each other. While conservation’s Western, science-based, culture may not yet have found a place for this language in its understanding of itself, love is absolutely what this work is about.

As we turn to the ILCN’s next Global Congress in 2027, the Australian delegation and its broad network of conservation practitioners and supporters look forward to welcoming ILCN participants and speakers to Melbourne, Australia, where they will share their extensive knowledge and experience, and continue to build the relationships that will unlock innovation and solutions for nature.

Have news? Share updates from your organization or country by emailing lrobinson@lincolninst.edu.