Efforts to protect water, habitat and other natural resources are often divorced from regional and local land use decision making and infrastructure investment.   Planners and conservation advocates are meeting this challenge by working across political jurisdictions to establish landscape conservation initiatives that protect watersheds, ecosystems and other landscape-scale processes by identifying and responding to the broader threats of regional land use and infrastructure investment decisions.

Large Landscape Conservation: A Strategic Framework for Policy and Action
"There is general agreement that the promise of large landscape conservation is its focus on land and water problems at an appropriate geographic scale, regardless of political and jurisdictional boundaries. ... Such efforts are multijurisdictional, multipurpose, and multistakeholder, and they operate at various geographic scales using a variety of governance arrangements."

A new policy focus report issued by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy -- an America 2050 partner -- focuses on strategies for regional collaboration to protect large landscapes in the United States.  Like megaregions, large landscapes span political boundaries and require ad-hoc and formal partnerships for their conservation. Regional Plan Association and America 2050 are now engaged in large landscapes work in the Northeast United States, in partnership with the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and the Lincoln Institute.  Download the Report.

The Doris Duke Charitable Foundation today announced a grant of $400,000 over three years to Regional Plan Association for wildlife conservation in the Northeast Megaregion as part of the America 2050 initiative. The funds will be applied to a new project to improve the integration of nature conservation with land use planning and infrastructure investments in 13 states across the Northeast, from Maine to Virginia. This marks the first effort to coordinate regional landscape conservation at the megaregion scale, mirroring similar large-scale efforts focused on transportation planning and advocacy that are underway in the Northeast Megaregion.

Read the news release

Download the paper.
By Frederick Steiner University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture and Robert Yaro, Regional Plan Association

This paper outlines strategies for identifying and protecting the large landscapes that represent the nation's natural, scenic, and historic heritage, beginning with a review of past efforts, and proceeding to suggestions for establishing national priorities for preservation. These strategies are needed in face of estimates that the U.S. will develop more land in the next four decades than we have in the past four centuries. Across the country, national parks are being damaged by over-use and under-maintenance, while some of the most productive agricultural lands in and near metropolitan areas are being fragmented by large lot subdivisions.

This paper is part of a series prepared by America 2050 for the Rockefeller Foundation Global Urban Summit in July 2007.