July 2023 Update
How can a private forest landowner realize the full value of the benefits that their forest provides so that they can keep their forests as forests?
Our Emerging Markets strategy-based team has been busy this month reimagining how private landowners can more fully monetize their forestland to support long-term forest management. From timber to pine straw, many in the forest conservation community have long relied on tried-and-true forest products to provide market-based incentives to forest landowners to continue their sustainable management of land as healthy forests. But as forest landowners and conservationists across the South continue to encounter unprecedented challenges, we at Keeping Forests are convening conversations and driving innovation to build new knowledge and new solutions to tackle today’s new trials.
Today, there simply aren’t any widely accessible markets for carbon, water, biodiversity, and other ecosystem services that forest landowners provide. At the core of the Emerging Markets team’s work is convening thought leaders from across various sectors to facilitate and catalyze the establishment of these emerging markets that will compensate landowners for the broad suite of benefits that their forests provide.
Keeping Forests is partnering with Impact by Design and the South Carolina Forestry Commission to pilot an innovative community-based social marketing campaign aimed at helping private landowners keep forests as forests in the Saluda River watershed. To launch this initiative, the Emerging Markets team gathered in Greenville, South Carolina, for a workshop on the social science underlying behavior change, a field tour of the watershed and local water treatment facility, and listening sessions with landowners and community members representing a variety of perspectives across the local landscape.
During our time in Greenville, the team gained critical insight into the challenges and trends presented by the pressures of growth and development. We also learned about the impact that shrinking wood markets are having on forest landowners and their ability to afford the active management required for healthy forests. In addition to our listening sessions, Impact by Design will continue the data-collection process to help build our knowledge and understanding of what is driving forest loss in this watershed and what might help curb that loss. This new knowledge base will then inform our community-based social marketing campaign that will be piloted and implemented in the Saluda River watershed through this innovative partnership.
The lessons learned, best practices developed, and tools created within the context of this local campaign will ultimately be adapted, packaged, and scaled so that they can be utilized across the South to replicate success across the region. Connecting with landowners and community members in this geography has sparked new energy and inspiration throughout the Emerging Markets team. And while we're beginning this initiative at the local level, we are always keeping an eye to continuing our innovation at scale across the South.
A key takeaway from our time together in Greenville is that “Conservation is about people.” Our innovations around monetizing the layers and layers of ecosystem services that Southern forests provide have just begun, but this work has already been deeply impacted and inspired by the people that make local and regional forest conservation possible: Southern forest landowners and the livelihoods that their forests support.
Lauren Ward
Keeping Forests Director of Strategic Initiatives
In collaboration with partners, Lauren plays a key role in catalyzing the creation of payment for services forests provide, such as cleaning our air, cleaning our water and protecting our wildlife.
