This year, Keeping Forests partnered with Impact by Design to help us understand how to develop, test, and implement community-based solutions that lead to forest conservation in the U.S. South. We've launched a pilot in the Saluda River Basin (SC) to design a methodology that can be scaled across the region.

Earlier this year, Keeping Forests partnered with Visible Network Labs to help us understand how to better leverage the conservation network across the U.S. South.

Why This Matters: Our network is broad, including more than 60 organizations that operate at a high degree of trust and expertise across 13 states and 245 million acres of forestland.

Keeping Forests has put in motion projects that will help move the needle for forest conservation across the US South. Over the following weeks, you will see content digging deeper on these strategies and be able learn more.

Hello Keeping Forests Partnership! We have been on a roll this summer and we’d like to share a few of our accomplishments and wins…

How can Keeping Forests support system-level change in support of forest products markets to the benefit of our forests and our society? This is the question our partners sought to answer as they convened at Ponce City Market earlier this month…

Want to know where Keeping Forests is headed? Check out the latest update from Keeping Forests’ Director of Strategic Initiatives, Lauren Ward.

In this letter to the partnership, Ward give a high-level overview to the future strategic direction of the emerging markets work stream.

Keeping Forests has partnered with the USDA Forest Service Southern Research Station (SRS) and NC State University to answer a key question — what is the value of forests to water quality and quantity?

Want to know where Keeping Forests is headed? Check out the latest update from Keeping Forests’ Executive Director, Laura Calandrella.

In this letter to the partnership, Calandrella give a high-level overview to the future strategic direction of this collaborative focused on region-wide forest conservation.

For more than forty years, Alton Perry has been working with landowners across eastern North Carolina. Perry now works with Roanoke Electric Cooperatives’ Sustainable Forestry & Land Retention project to empower landowners with knowledge and technical assistance to steward their land.

As the world faces continued pressure from climate change, forests provide part of the solution. An innovative building material called mass timber is coming online in the U.S. South and has great potential for adoption across the region’s new construction projects.

Friends —

As we round the corner to head into Spring, I’m excited to see that the seeds of Keeping Forests’ strategy are coming to life. Keeping Forests is unique in its role of catalyzing market-based forest conservation across an entire landscape, the U.S. South. Our success depends on our ability to convene a community of multi-sector partners to determine the most innovative solutions that can be brought to scale. 

Numerous activities can take place in southern working forests. Outdoor enthusiasts spend over $320 billion annually across the U.S. South which provides over 2.7 million jobs.

Forests provide products that we use every day. From the wood framing of our homes to bathroom tissue, we touch forest products hundreds of times a day. In this article, Keeping Forests set out to explore five of the most innovative products coming from the forests today.

Partners and Friends –

As 2023 settles in and the next chapter of Keeping Forests’ work gets underway, there is one word that keeps surfacing for me that describes where we are: expansiveness.

For many in our urbanized world, we spend most of our lives inside. In fact, the EPA reports that Americans, on average, spend 90% of their time indoors. According to polls, Americans have never been as anxious as they feel now. Anxiety and increased levels of stress can be attributed to a number of environmental factors; however, evidence suggests that time spent in forests can be a natural solution.

Mobile, AL - Forest champions are not always who we picture them to be. These individuals can be considered “outsiders” to the traditional forestry industry, but have significant impact on people who make decisions that impact the entire sector. Colin McDonald, Senior Policy Analyst for the Texas Water Foundation, is a forest champion.

To everyone who attended Keeping Forests Annual Meeting in Mobile, thank you for making this event a success! Your collaboration, ideas, and resources have energized our efforts for 2023, and we are excited to see what we can accomplish together in the new year.

In an effort to keep our entire coalition engaged and up to speed on our goals for the coming year, we are providing the following information as a re-cap of our meeting and our next steps.

The 27th Conference of the Parties of the United Nations, also known as COP27, is currently underway in Egypt. Beginning in 1992 as an international treaty, the conference convenes annually to discuss international cooperation to combat climate change. Nature-based solutions to climate action – and within that, working forests – continue to be a key part of the solution sets being discussed on this global stage. As the world continues to look to the forest for answers, public and private partnerships, like Keeping Forests, will continue to provide measurable conservation value.