Large Landscape Conservation

Over the past two years, the International Land Conservation Network has convened the first cohort of the Large Landscape Peer Learning Initiative (LLPLI) to share insights and strategies regarding finance, governance, law and policy, and stewardship. These exchanges and in-depth strategic collaborations between large landscape conservation leaders from California, the Appalachian Trail in the eastern United States, Chile’s Mediterranean Zone and Chilean Patagonia have generated a variety of significant, strategic and replicable results. Come meet several of the key participants and learn along with them regarding the power of peer exchange and collaborative processes.

In this webinar, 2019 Kingsbury Browne Fellow Michael Whitfield makes a case for holistic landscape conservation efforts, discusses elements of holistic landscape collaboration that meet both ecological and social goals, and examines the consequences of their implementation in multiple settings. This webinar, which is moderated by Jim Levitt, draws from Whitfield’s 2019 working paper, “Toward Holistic Landscape Conservation in the 21st Century”.

The Large Landscape Peer Learning Initiative (LLPLI) is an effort designed to: help articulate, through peer exchange and sharing of best practices, the strategic vision of large landscape conservation initiatives around the globe, and to monitor the implementation of these strategic visions over time. 

In America we enjoy an amazing conservation legacy. However, all of Planet Earth is in the midst of an environmental and social crisis. Here in the United States, observers often see conflict between efforts to conserve nature in the face of massive loss of biological diversity versus efforts to provide all our people with suitable housing and access to adequate food, clean air and water, and outdoor recreation. Yet both of these challenges are symptomatic of the same threats: a burgeoning human population with out-of-scale environmental impacts, ecological and social fragmentation, and the ever more serious threat of climate change. The emergence of landscape conservation through robust human community collaboration that provides for the non-human interests of wildlife and nature is seen as a necessary approach to meet these daunting challenges. Across the country there are many examples of conservation success through landscape collaboration, but the concept is hindered by incomplete application and a lack of suitable measures of program outcomes. In this paper we make a case for holistic landscape conservation efforts, discuss proposed elements for holistic landscape collaborations that meet both ecological and social goals, and examine the consequences of their implementation in multiple settings. 

In response to increasing activity at the large landscape scale, leaders from the public, private and nongovernmental sectors participated in two national policy dialogues and many other informal discussions in 2009.