Nature Unites Us: Conservation Impact in Oregon
Learn how TNC is scaling up our work in the Oregon 2022-2025 Strategic Plan.
Nature Unites Us
We are working toward a future where all Oregonians benefit equally from clean air and water, our state leads the way on climate solutions and our most critical lands and waters are connected, protected and managed to sustain nature in the face of climate change.
We work with our colleagues across the West to protect the Sagebrush Sea, the Emerald Edge and more as we strive to achieve TNC's 2030 goals. Join us as we scale up our work, leverage our history of success and help people and nature thrive.
Our Essential Pillars
As we work to address the planet’s greatest needs, we recognize that the well-being of nature and people cannot be separated, and how we work is as important as what we achieve. We are committed to examining all dimensions of our work through the lenses of four cross-cutting pillars:
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Indigenous Right Relations
Our interactions with Tribes and Indigenous communities must honor their history and relationship with the land. We will learn and grow with traditional ecological knowledge, pairing it with Western science when invited, to strengthen conservation.
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Equity in Science and Conservation
We aspire to be intentional and thoughtful about benefits and burdens, historic injustices and unintended consequences to ensure that conservation actions are enhancing health and well-being and not causing harm.
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Policy and Advocacy
We bring a distinct voice to policy discussions, based on our on-the-ground expertise, demonstration projects and science. We will use that voice to maximize our impact for the collective good of people and nature in Oregon.
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Leveraging Our Lands
We work to apply the lessons learned through decades of carefully stewarding our preserves as well as the ecological knowledge of our Indigenous partners to a new vision for improving our relationships to Oregon’s diverse landscapes at scale.
Climate Action
The days of debate around climate change are long gone. Here in the Pacific Northwest and around the world, we are already experiencing its impacts. Longer, hotter and drier summers. Larger, more extreme weather events. Dangerous urban heat effects. Increasing risks to water security.
We recognize the urgent need for action. What we do between now and 2030 will determine whether warming can be slowed enough to avoid the worst of climate change’s impacts. We must drastically cut emissions and remove carbon pollution from the atmosphere. Fortunately, nature holds many answers. By investing in nature to protect and restore key habitats and carefully managing our working landscapes, we can store vast amounts of carbon.
Climate science drives our conservation priorities. In Oregon, the coming years will see more opportunity for TNC to engage with climate policy design and implementation, advance natural climate solutions, improve community health through urban canopy projects and protect Oregon’s sustainable water future.
Together, we can limit some of the future warming and the many dangers it poses—but only if we act now. This is our moment. These are our strategies.
Tackle Climate Change
Natural Climate Solutions
Protection, restoration, and improved land management of natural and working lands—or natural climate solutions—can store more carbon while providing wildlife habitat and community benefits. A study produced by The Nature Conservancy in collaboration with Portland State University found that if statewide emissions targets are met, natural climate solutions could offer as much as 67% of the additional mitigation needed to reach net zero emissions in Oregon. We’re working to champion natural climate solutions by providing science, supporting demonstration projects, and advocating for new policies. We aim to achieve a 50% increase in natural climate solutions projects on public and private land by 2025.
Climate Policy
Science tells us that the most urgent global threat we face today is climate change, and we’re already experiencing a range of its consequences right here in the Pacific Northwest, including urban heat, ocean acidification, and more frequent and severe wildfire. To ensure that Oregon is a leader in addressing the challenges of climate change, we’re working with partners to advance policies that reduce emissions and increase carbon storage. By providing science and leveraging our relationships, we can help shape renewable energy development policies that avoid negative impacts to habitats and communities. We are also working to support the role of Indigenous peoples and Tribal governments in climate decisions. Together we can help meet our state goal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 45% by 2035.
Offshore Energy Siting
Oregon’s highly valuable offshore energy resources are creating growing pressure to site new developments, and current federal policy allows developers to claim sites without proactive consideration of important habitats. The state and federal government have agreed to begin a planning process to identify places where energy development could be sited with the least negative impacts, and we are supporting this process with science and technical assistance. We’re working to ensure that, by 2030, offshore renewable energy developments are sited to protect the most important habitats.
Urban Tree Canopy
The Portland metro area is experiencing extremely hot summer days more frequently, which leads to poor air quality and increased health risks. Due to a history of racial injustice in Portland, heat islands are disproportionately concentrated in overlooked and underinvested neighborhoods that have experienced persistent environmental inequity. To improve the equitable distribution of trees and the many benefits they bring, a group of local partners—The Blueprint Foundation, The Intertwine Alliance, and The Nature Conservancy—have launched an initiative called Connecting Canopies.
We’re working to bring together neighborhoods, government, partners, and businesses to co-create an urban tree stewardship model that is community-led and data-driven. Together we’re centering BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and people of color) communities to help enhance and expand the urban tree canopy where it is most needed. Our goal is for the Portland metro region to be on a trajectory to achieve and maintain at least a 35% cover of healthy tree canopy by 2030.
Sustainable Water
Oregon is running out of usable water—a problem deepened by overallocation, aging infrastructure, growing demand, and the increasing duration and frequency of drought due to climate change. Oregon’s water management is hindered by information gaps, limited management tools, and outdated policies. We’re working to improve Oregon’s water security by filling critical information gaps, engaging with community-based planning processes to use new water management tools, and collaborating with partners to develop water-smart policies and practices. By 2040, we aim to help secure sustainable drinking water for the 70% of Oregonians who rely on groundwater for drinking.
Healthy Lands, Oceans, Waters
For more than 60 years, The Nature Conservancy has been a trusted leader in protecting the lands and waters upon which all life depends. From our very first Oregon preserve, the 26-acre Camassia Natural Area in West Linn, to our most recent collaborative conservation win—Trout Creek Ranch that protects more than 500,000 acres near the Pueblo and Trout Creek Mountains in southeastern Oregon—we recognize the power of place and the importance of preserving biodiversity. Over the years, the scale of our work has grown, but our commitment to science and on-the-ground conservation work remains central to our mission. We believe in a future where people and nature thrive together, and that means striking a balance to provide for and sustain our communities while also protecting the nature that makes it all possible. Clean air and water, healthy habitats and working landscapes—what’s good for nature is good for Oregonians.
Increasing Landscape Resilience
Resilient Rangelands
In the face of invasive annual grasses, more frequent drought, and increasingly severe wildfire, The Nature Conservancy is working to advance sustainable grazing and land management practices that promote resilience to climate change in Oregon’s rangelands and communities. We’re partnering with the Bureau of Land Management to deliver tools in a community of practice that unites public land managers across disciplines and geographies. We’re also working to foster trust, cooperation, and the sharing of best practices among private landowners in collaborative working groups. Our preserves will continue to be important places to demonstrate new techniques, and where we can work with our neighbors to restore habitat and reduce wildfire risk at a larger scale. By 2030, we’re working to help improve or maintain one million acres of public and private sage-steppe and grassland with sustainable practices.
Dry Forests and Fire
Oregon’s dry forests evolved with smaller fires burning frequently across the landscape. These low-intensity events create the disturbances that many plants and animals need to thrive and leave an open patchwork of large, older, fire-adapted trees. More than a century of fire exclusion has left one-third of Oregon’s dry forests—over six million acres—in dire need of restoration. Now, unhealthy forest conditions and a changing climate have led to unprecedented wildfires and smoke that threaten our forests, communities, and public health. We’re working to catalyze a fundamental shift in forest restoration and create a shared understanding of the need to use beneficial fire in the right places at the right times. By bringing together the many voices and wide expertise needed, we aim to support ecological restoration on an additional 750,000 acres by 2025.
Healthy Estuaries
Tidal wetlands and estuaries—where rivers and oceans meet—are some of the most ecologically rich and complex areas on Earth. Although estuaries provide critical habitat for juvenile fish and help protect communities from storm surges and flooding, today only 17% of Oregon’s tidal wetlands remain in healthy condition.
We are working to protect and restore estuaries with acquisition and restoration projects and by improving the connectivity of estuaries on working lands. Updating infrastructure like tide gates can improve fish access in the winter while giving farmers and ranchers more control over their lands during the growing season. We aim to protect and restore 1,350 acres of tidal wetlands by 2025.
Explore more about our work with estuaries and tidal wetlands.
Leveraging Our Lands
Since 1961, you have helped us protect thousands of acres of special places, from Cascade Head to Zumwalt Prairie. Many of these places also help us advance key conservation strategies, like critical fire research at Sycan Marsh Preserve and restoring the sagebrush sea at Juniper Hills Preserve. The lessons learned through decades of carefully stewarding our preserves and the ecological knowledge of our Indigenous partners have informed our vision for improving our relationships to Oregon’s diverse landscapes at scale. Connect with our Oregon preserves.
Connect With Our Preserves
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Through the Fire
In summer of 2021, the Bootleg Fire became the third largest wildfire in Oregon history, burning through nearly 15,000 acres on The Nature Conservancy's Sycan Marsh Preserve.
Reconnecting the Willamette River
After a century of being separated, we've reconnected the Willamette River to floodplain and wetlands, improving habitat and safeguarding the community from the risk of flooding.
Restoring Tidal Wetlands at Winter Lake
The installation of tide gates and restoration of tidal wetlands at Winter Lake will provide critical rearing habitat for juvenile salmon, boosting populations in the Coquille River.