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Dave Strauss:

Good evening and welcome to tonight's live Q&A call. I'm Dave Strauss, Director of Membership at the Nature Conservancy, and I'll be your moderator tonight. Thanks again for being part of the Nature Conservancy's community. Your support means so much and I'm really glad we have this chance to connect with each other through this town hall event.

Our featured guest, the Nature Conservancy CEO, Jennifer Morris, has an accomplished career in conservation. We are honored to have her here to talk with you, answer your questions, and share her perspective on how we will continue working to safeguard the lands and waters that sustain all of us. For more than 25 years, Jennifer has dedicated her life to protecting the environment for people and nature. With decades of experience in conservation, her leadership emphasizes proven management, innovative finance solutions, and science-based approaches centered on communities. Prior to leaving the Nature Conservancy, Jennifer held a series of leadership roles at Conservation International where she notably led their work on impact finance and ultimately served as both the COO and president.

In 2023, Jennifer was named the Times Inaugural Climate 100 list of leaders as well as Fortune's 50 over 50 for impact. She serves on numerous global councils and boards, including chairing the board of Enduring for Earth. At the Nature Conservancy, Jennifer leads a global team of 5,000 plus staff in more than 70 countries in tackling the dual crisis of climate emergency and biodiversity loss.

Welcome, Jen. I know our supporters on the phone will have great questions for you tonight. Let me hand it over to you to welcome those who have just joined us and share a few thoughts before we open up the lines for questions.

Again, if you'd like to ask a question during tonight's telephone town hall event or if you have any comments for our speaker, please press zero at any time to ask your question. We'll also have a couple chances for you to share your thoughts with a few interactive polling questions as we go along.

Jen, thanks for joining us, please.

Jennifer Morris:

Thank you so much, Dave. I'm really excited to be here with all of you tonight and I look forward to hearing your questions in just a couple of minutes.

Now, one of the first things that drew me to Nature Conservancy is the incredible community of global members. So whether you're a new supporter, a longtime member, a legacy club member, or a volunteer who gives your time, each and every one of you play an absolutely critical role in helping the Nature Conservancy achieve our mission of creating a world where people and nature thrive together.

So in the last year or so, I've visited so many of our projects and partners around the world from renewable energy projects close to where I live in Virginia, in Kentucky, to community conservancies in Kenya in East Africa. And I'm reminded that through all these visits that your vital support makes our work together possible.

I've had the honor and privilege of meeting many of you all on the road, and I continue to be inspired by the dedication of TNC supporters to protecting nature and all that it gives us. And your support continues to be even more critical every day. It's no secret that the intertwined crises of rapid biodiversity loss and climate change are among the greatest challenges of our time.

At TNC, we are tackling these urgent threats head on. We've sharpened our organizational focus and committed to our most ambitious goals ever to protect nature and people. Our decades-Long approach to conservation is rooted in world-class science, grounded in deep partnership and guided by collaboration with local and indigenous communities. And because all paths to a more sustainable world are directly dependent on our ability to protect the lands and waters that provide us with clean air and water and healthy food and a stable climate. And we need you with us to ensure this future becomes a reality.

So Dave, I'm really looking forward to our discussion tonight and hearing everyone's thoughts, everyone's questions, and having an open dialogue. Thank you all so much for being here with us. And with that, I'll turn it back over to Dave.

Dave Strauss:

Great, thanks Jen. Appreciate that. And welcome to anyone who just joined us. It's a privilege to have CEO Jennifer Morris with us tonight for this live Q&A discussion on conservation priorities. As a reminder, to ask a question, please press zero on your telephone keypad at any time.

While we wait to get our first caller, I wanted to say thank you again to everyone participating in this virtual town hall event tonight. Your support means so much. We are united in our mission to protect the lands and waters on which all life depends, but each of us is inspired to act for different reasons. So I want to ask a quick poll question to get a sense of why protecting nature matters to you. So to respond, just press the corresponding number on your telephone keypad.

Why do you choose to help protect nature? Press one if you want to preserve beautiful lands and waters. Press two if you care about saving wildlife. Press three if you're concerned about climate change. Press four if you want to support people who depend on nature for their livelihoods and wellbeing. Press five for all the above. Press six for other.

Let me quickly repeat. Press one if you want to preserve beautiful lands and waters. Press two if you care about saving wildlife. Press three if you're concerned about climate change. Press four if you want to support people who depend on nature for their livelihoods and wellbeing. Press five for all the above and press six for other. Your questions will help guide our discussions and we'll have the results for you in just a bit. Be sure to press zero if you have or if you'd like to ask a question during tonight's live Q&A.

Tonight's event is meant to be a dialogue about issues that are important to you. Last week we sent an email survey asking participants what question they most wanted you to answer tonight. The majority of supporters said this question was top of mind for them, and that's where we'll start. So the question, Jen, is what do you see as the biggest opportunity to protect land and water at scale?

Jennifer Morris:

Great, thanks so much. This is a fantastic question. So we've had a lot of momentum in the last year around countries around the world; in fact, 190 countries to be exact; who've come together in something called the Conference of Parties 15 on something called the Convention on Biological Diversity, which is basically where countries come together similar to what you've heard about the Paris Agreement, but this time for nature. And have come together and after two weeks of negotiation, we reached a landmark historic agreement called the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. And this is basically a very much needed, long overdue international blueprint to guide the planet and the collective turnaround of the biodiversity crisis within this decade.

So through this framework, nearly every country in the world committed to protect 30% of their land, their ocean, and the inland waters, rivers, et cetera, wetlands, by the year 2030. Now this 30% is the amount that scientists around the world think is the minimum amount of preserved nature around the world that we need to basically protect our vital ecosystems. And while many people would argue 30% may not be enough, this is a fantastic start. So it's so great to see the momentum on the world stage.

But now comes the tough part. We've had the wonderful moment. We've had the ribbon cutting and everyone celebrated, but now we have to turn those commitments into real action. And that's where I think the Nature Conservancy, through some really important partnerships, is doing some of the most incredible cutting edge work in this space. And I'll mention one that some of you on the phone may have heard about before because it really is one of the most exciting things I think that's happening not just with the Nature Conservancy, but in the entire conservation space right now and it's a collaboration called Enduring Earth.

Through this partnership, we are working directly with two other very large conservation organizations, the World Wildlife Fund and Pew Charitable Trusts, as well as with an organization called ZOMALAB, which is working together for the first time, together, setting goals jointly, fundraising together, to really accelerate long-term durable conservation. To help those countries that have raised their hand and said, "We want 30% protection by 2030, but we need help. We need financial support and we need technical support to ensure that we can achieve that 30% goal in just really six years."

So this project, this effort to Enduring Earth is already providing significant impacts around the world. It's through a model we call Project Finance for Permanence and it basically brings all the stakeholders working together in agriculture, mining, extractive industries, as well as local indigenous communities with governments together to develop a blueprint, to develop a plan for how to preserve that 30% while still maintaining the country's livelihood and this is absolutely critical for local communities.

So we're having lots of success. In fact, today we became very close to closing the Nature Conservancy's lead transaction for this partnership, which just began a few years ago. And by 2030, we are on track to protect 600 million hectares of land, ocean, and inland waterways with 20 nations around the world while creating huge opportunities for sustainable growth.

So as you can hear from my voice, this is one of the most exciting things that we're doing, and I love to see that we as Nature Conservancy in deep partnership with other organizations are able to come together for real results to help that 2030 goal that was created back in Kunming and Montreal.

Dave Strauss:

Thanks, Jan. I think we can solve just about anything with all your energy, so thank you.

I'm also just looking at the results from our first poll. I'm happy to see that 7% of you said that you choose to help because you care about making sure beautiful lands and waters are protected. And it's also great to see that a lot of you care about all the above which came in at 74%. That's a great testament to how interconnected our work is. When we protect a forest or store coral reefs, the results have a wide range of benefits for climate, for biodiversity, and for people.

Jen, I'm sure you share the same feeling. Now let's hear from our first caller. As a reminder, you can press zero at any time on your telephone keypad to ask a question live tonight. We'll try to get as many as possible. So listen for your name once you get into the queue.

And our first caller is Christine from New Hampshire. New Hampton, excuse me, New Hampshire. Christine?

Christine:

Yes. Hello.

Dave Strauss:

Hi Christine.

Christine:

Can I go ahead? Is that all right?

Dave Strauss:

Oh, absolutely.

Jennifer Morris:

Yeah. Go ahead. Go ahead.

Christine:

Okay. I wanted to find out how the Nature Conservancy, or if you can explain it in a few minutes, how you prioritize projects. And I realize that depends on scale, so I'll let you pick whatever scale you are comfortable discussing. But part of that is, is this something that you look at in say like a five-year term, or do you shorten that down to two years, or is it so flexible because of climate change and the way things are unfortunately moving fast, is this something that's ... What do I want to say? How stable are your plans?

Jennifer Morris:

Christine, thank you so much for that question. I'm so glad that you asked that and that you're with us tonight. So this is one of the most fundamental questions of the Nature Conservancy and of really our entire sector. As you said, climate change is barreling down on us and we're seeing it every day where we're working and we prioritize our work in several ways. But first and foremost, Christine is that we are working on a set of clear, measurable 2030 goals. So we developed these goals. It's been almost two years now, and these are goals that we hope everyone is behind within the Nature Conservancy. Almost 6,000 of us now. Whether you're sitting in Indiana or Indonesia, that you know that as an institution we have these clear goals around climate, around nature, protection, land, waters, around people, around oceans, and we all are rowing that boat in the same direction together.

Now at the individual level, at the state level, say in New Hampshire and other places, we are looking for scale. So of course there are things that we need to do because they're important for New Hampshire, but we also want to see that they're going to be important for our global 2030 goals. So Increasingly, we're trying to prioritize those things, whether they're policy initiatives in Northeastern United States that could lead to big-scale conservation.

Policy is a great amplifier and accelerator of impact. But to have those real policy wins, you often have to see that you have success locally so that you can go to the policymakers and say to them, "We did this great thing here at this scale. Why don't you look at changing some rules to make it be much, much broader?" So we're doing that across our work and certainly in ocean protection, trying to get 100% of all fishing boats in the high seas and in nearshore fisheries to have electronic monitoring on their boats.

So a technology intervention, Christine, can be hugely important to achieve that kind of scale, but we try to find those things that will really accelerate and amplify and have the highest, what we're calling conservation return on investment so that we make sure that every dollar that a member gives is going to have the highest impact to those really audacious 2030 goals.

So I love that question. It's a perfect question for us to start off because it really is how we're guiding all of our work now through the Nature Conservancy.

Dave Strauss:

Yep. Great. Thank you Kristi. And it was a really good question. As a reminder, you can press zero at any time on your telephone keypad to ask a question live tonight. And we'll go to our next caller. We have Teresa Tupez from Michigan. Teresa?

Teresa:

Hi, can you hear me?

Dave Strauss:

Yes, we can.

Jennifer Morris:

Yes.

Dave Strauss:

Feel free to ask the question.

Teresa:

Thank you. I'm a corporate sustainability manager in an automotive firm and one of my objectives is biodiversity. So you can imagine the challenges for the auto industry with our manufacturing and looking at how to improve our footprint for biodiversity. I was wondering what type of partnerships is the TNC looking for and forming with corporations?

Jennifer Morris:

Absolutely. So thank you so much for that question, Teresa. So we do a lot of work with companies. First and foremost, we want to work with companies that have set ambitious goals who are on a pathway to evolve their business to make sure that they are protecting biodiversity, protecting nature, and of course looking to reduce their emissions and to really be future-proof for what's coming for our planet. We absolutely, fundamentally believe in working constructively with companies. I think that's one thing that really sets TNC apart perhaps from some of our peers. We don't necessarily shout about a company who we don't agree with in public. If there's something that a company is not doing that we don't particularly like, we think a better strategy is for myself or one of my team to have a direct relationship with and a direct conversation and dialogue with the company.

We know there are many environmental organizations out there who have fantastic approaches that are quite different from ours, and those achieve results as well. But we really feel that often when I talk to CEOs and heads of sustainability team, they say, "What we love about the Nature Conservancy is that you all will sit down with us and recognize that we share this problem together." We are all on this big, blue marble together and we have to use our best in class science to solve complex problems.

Companies want to solve those problems too. They often don't know how to do it. Some do and those are the ones we want to push. But the ones like yours who are saying, "We need to do better for nature," we want to sit down with those types of companies and really figure out where are the challenges and how can we with science and our wonderful staff who are ... We have over a 1,000 scientists at the Nature Conservancy where we can really help address some of those challenges. We may not have the answers. We may need to work with other organizations or suggest other organizations you can work with, but really having those constructive dialogs is the way we approach working with companies.

Without companies, without the drivers of the economies on this planet, there's no way we can achieve any of the goals under the biodiversity framework or of course under our Paris target. So we have to work with companies and that has been TNC's approach from day one and will continue to be for the foreseeable future.

Dave Strauss:

Great, thanks, Jen. As we've talked about, climate change is a critical priority for the Nature Conservancy and so far our next polling question, we'd like to know how much all of you talk about climate change with your families and friends. Press one if you talk about climate change often. Press two, occasionally and press three, rarely.

Again we'd like to know how much you all talk about climate change with friends and family. Press one if you talk about climate change often. Press two if you talk about climate change occasionally, and press three if you talk about climate change rarely.

And now we will go to our next caller. Are you ready, Jen?

Jennifer Morris:

Yes.

Dave Strauss:

We have Don Berlin from Arizona. Don?

Don:

Hello?

Dave Strauss:

Hello Don, how are you?

Don:

Yeah, fine. I'm doing good and you?

Dave Strauss:

Fantastic. Jen and I are doing great. Feel free to ask your question.

Don:

Yeah, my question is what specifically is the Natural Conservancy doing to address animal agriculture?

Jennifer Morris:

Yes, thank you, Don. So the Nature Conservancy is doing a lot in this space. I'll just give you ... Just for those of you on the phone who may not be aware. There is no way that we can address climate change without addressing agriculture. Not just how we grow or raise animals, but also how we actually produce. So food, we talk about agriculture and food production when we think about the impacts.

The estimates vary, but we know that 30% of the solution to the climate crisis is directly related to changing agriculture. And to your point, specifically animal agriculture. So animal agriculture, in particular beef, represents not only one of the hugest challenges on planet earth. If you think about the scale of the impact of one sector, the beef sector in the country of Brazil alone, it's estimated to be about 24% of tropical deforestation is coming just from that one sector and that one country.

So it's a huge problem. But we also recognize there's a huge opportunity there because we are working very constructively with a lot of the companies who are engaged in this space as well as policy leaders who again have raised their hand and said, "We recognize that we don't want to have our animal agriculture contribute so much to global climate change and to of course biodiversity loss through degradation of forests, in particular in this case in the Amazon. We want to stop that. We want to be more of a leader in this space and right now we are not."

Our work in animal agriculture deals across where the threats are. So example in Brazil, which I just mentioned, but also we're seeing huge opportunities say in the US where we have a whole program that we call FoodScape, which is working on something called regenerative agriculture. How do we create the right production systems? How do we create the right incentives for farmers? Farmers are not the enemy. Farmers are the heroes of our agricultural production systems. But for so often environmentalists have blamed farmers for the problem.

The Nature Conservancy's approach is very different. We want to make sure that farmers have the right tools, the right access to finance, and quite frankly, the right policies which include the right pricing for products which are healthier not only for us as humans to eat, but also healthier for soils. The soils that those farmers and ranchers depend on for the future production of their products in an increasingly stressed out planet. So that's something really important that we work on very constructively. We work on it in Australia all over Europe. We're doing a ton of really interesting new work in Canada and of course have deep, deep engagements throughout Central and South America as well as in the US so we firmly believe that we have to work and address animal agriculture, but feel like there's a lot of constructive ways to do that where the farmers and ranchers continue to be central to the solution.

Dave Strauss:

Great. Thanks Jen. Thanks Don for the question. Let's take another caller and just a reminder. Press zero on your telephone keypad to ask a question live tonight. And our next caller, we have Chris from Pennsylvania. Chris.

Chris:

Yes. Hi. Thanks for taking my call. I actually live in East Stroudsburg, which is near the Tannersville Cranberry Bog, which you may know as one of yours. It's beautiful.

I wanted to say from the get-go that I think you're doing the right approach. You're working with companies and farmers in a practical and pragmatic approach to getting change accomplished. And I also wanted to thank the Nature Conservancy and other organizations that are also helping buy Boy Scout properties that are now being sold and prevent them from being developed as part of the Boy Scouts mission to raise money. My son is a Boy Scout, and I think it's very important to protect those properties.

But anyway, my question is more local. Here in Pennsylvania, and I'm sure many other places, because I've read about it; in Maryland, New York, other places; there are efforts underway, including myself personally in my own yard, to plant more trees. And me and my son also volunteer at preserves and other areas nearby to plant trees. And it seems like such a battle because of the deer population, which has grown by leaps and bounds. And they literally will eat or destroy trees up until the age of ... I don't know, maybe when the tree is five years old and is big and strong enough. Because they either eat the leaves, eat the actual branches, or the bucks will grill the tree and kill them.

You can't just plant a lot of trees and walk away. That doesn't happen. You can't do that.

Jennifer Morris:

Yes.

Chris:

So I'm wondering is there any coordinated strategy? I'm not a hunter, but I certainly have nothing wrong with people hunting because if they eat the deer ... It's a big problem. And I've read stories about how this is a big problem elsewhere where there's no undergrowth. There's nothing coming up. If I just left an acre alone for four years, it's not like I'd have all these young trees. It'd be nothing. It'd be literally nothing because of the wildlife in the area. So how does the Nature Conservancy approach that issue and work with the dynamics there? Because obviously it's not some easy issue to deal with.

Jennifer Morris:

Right. Well Chris, thank you so much for being on tonight and for asking that multifaceted question. So I hear you saying trees are of course important to plant. We do a lot of restoration work around the world. Your challenge is a challenge that a lot of organizations face when they go out or individuals when they go out and try to plant trees. And unfortunately because a lot of the apex predators have been removed from our ecosystems, you have too many browsers, too many grazers, and they're putting stress on those. Obviously there's the eating whatever they can.

I have seen some interesting work in fact in Pennsylvania where we've actually fenced off lands, done restoration in plots and some areas we were able to put in fencing to prevent the deer from coming in versus areas that didn't have that. And obviously not surprisingly, the difference is just absolutely astounding. So that's one solution of course is fence where you can. It's clearly expensive and it's not available for a lot of people to do. I think finding those areas where you can plant, where you don't have the predation problem or the browsing and grazing problem is obviously one of the solutions we try to do.

I think that another strategy, there's been so much failure, quite frankly in the tree planting space, and not necessarily for the reasons that you state, but also just because people will plant at scale using drones and other well-intentioned approaches, but then they're not going back and actually doing the care and feeding literally of the trees, and so they often die.

And so what we're learning, Chris, about the more effective tree planting strategies. Instead of planting new saplings that maybe have been grown in a nursery and then putting them out in almost a mono crop way is that one of the more effective strategies is actually more what we call afforestation. So you actually use natural seeds, you collect seeds from a neighboring adjacent forest or inner crops within an existing forest, and you actually plant trees that are close to a natural forest. The growth rates are better, the protection is better. All the factors seem to point to just a better result for tree planting.

We are of course, as Nature Conservancy, not at all in favor of planting exotic species, planting trees that don't belong in a place, even if they're able to grow quickly because that's just not really restoring nature in the way that it needs to be restored. You see a lot of tree planting projects around the world that are planting eucalyptus or very fast-growing species and not just in Australia and places that shouldn't have eucalyptus. And so seeing that and this push to just plant trillions of trees, you have to really use the best-in-class science and lessons that we've learned in this space and try to do it in the right way.

But your challenge is one that many people face. The best approach that we've seen in your very, very specific circumstance in addition to trying to bring back a better balance in the ecosystem is of course using fencing when you can, you have that available to you.

So great question, big challenge, but thank you for doing what you are doing to get as many trees back into the ground that will survive. It is a critical part of capturing carbon and something that TNC takes very seriously and has learned a lot over the years of doing this.

Dave Strauss:

Great, thanks Jen. I wanted to quickly get to the results from our second audience poll. 44% of you say you talk about climate change often. That's excellent because research shows that most people in the US are unsure about how to talk about this important topic. That's why we developed our Let's Talk Climate How-To guide with lots of tips for opening up conversations. You can search for it on nature.org and we'll also be sending it out to our supporters by email later this month. So if you aren't on our email list, please sign up.

And we will now go to our next caller. We have Pam from Oregon. Pam?

Pam:

Well, thanks so much for having this forum and I was very impressed by about the efforts of working with all the countries to try and preserve 30% of land for nature. My question is how do you work with these countries to make sure that what they're preserving is a diverse biosphere and not just the unerrable leftover land in that country?

Jennifer Morris:

Oh, Pam. Great, great question and thank you for reminding me to talk about quality. So quality is just as important if not more important than quantity. And so when we are working with the country, I'll give you a very specific example. I just came back from Kenya a couple of weeks ago. We took our global board there to learn about our work to help the government of Kenya create a long-term durable plan for 30% protection, which they have signed up to. And now comes, as I said before, the really challenging work of deciding where is that best 30%.

So how we do is we sit down with all of the important ministries? Environment of course, but also agriculture, fisheries. We had folks from the president's office. We met with the president himself to talk about a whole process for land use planning. So we basically take a map of the country. We know a lot about its biodiversity, and the local countries, Kenya is no exception, often have pretty good biodiversity data so we can determine what's currently protected, what is not currently protected.

So in Kenya, over 60% of wildlife, so the animals that many of us love to go and visit on Safari, they actually exist outside of formal protected areas. So the opportunity there is to work directly with communities and something called community conservancies to create those conservancies in those corridors. There's a big effort right now to create a large-scale rhino corridor, and we as Nature Conservancy and local partners just actually reintroduced 21 black rhino to one of those conservancies. So working with communities to really build their capacity to do nature conservation, even outside those protected areas.

So generally, Pam, what we do is basically sit down, we look at the maps, look at what's protected, where the financing gaps are, and then how they're going to achieve that 30%. But to your excellent question, it has to be a quality 30%. We're not interested in degraded land that's been mined and really has no use for agriculture, for ecosystem services. It's got to be high quality and that's part of the whole process when we develop these plans with countries. So great question.

Dave Strauss:

Yeah, I would agree. Pam, really great question.

Just another reminder, press zero on your telephone keypad to ask a question live tonight.

And let's take another question from the phone. We've got Rick from Ohio. Rick?

Rick:

Yeah.

Dave Strauss:

Welcome.

Rick:

I thought this was recorded. Okay. It's getting back to the primary question of what you're doing to go forward. It's the reverse of that. What is the greatest barrier to achieving your goals?

Jennifer Morris:

Yeah, Rick, that's a great question obviously, and something that I think about all the time as CEO is what are we doing too much of that are not serving us to scale and what are our biggest challenges?

I would say one of the biggest challenges, or maybe the primary barrier is related to something I mentioned earlier, and that is being able to scale fast enough through policy. When we can change a policy, for example, some of the work that has happened in the US around being able to have more incentives for more money, frankly, for doing solar and wind development on former mine lands. And through the Infrastructure Act here in the US where we've gotten a lot more investment into that. That one signal enables us to transform at a pace and scale that we couldn't do without it.

So the biggest barrier in the US and outside the US quite frankly, is getting those policy changes, especially during a year. I am sure many of you on the phone are acutely aware of this, that this is one of the most important election years, not just in the United States but globally. And so as we see potential changeovers where I think it's something like almost half the world's population is going to be voting in an election this year in the democratic world at least. We are seeing so many of our countries where we don't know what's going to happen. We could have a new administration or new leadership at a local level that is not necessarily supporting the bold ambitions that the previous administration had.

So I would say that the primary barrier in my mind ... Of course there's others. There's financial challenges. We are really trying to supercharge our investments in this space and the need to continuously focus. But I'd say the biggest barrier right now, or the biggest challenge definitely is on the policy side. So that's why our investments in policy are so important and why I'm really excited about the team that we are developing in our policy shop, both at the local level, at the international level, and certainly here in the United States. So very, very excellent question.

Dave Strauss:

Great, thank you. So Jan, before we take another question, I wanted to talk about your personal connection to nature. When you're able to take some time away from work; which you are very busy. I track you on LinkedIn and you're posting every day in some other part of the world. How do you most like to connect with nature?

Jennifer Morris:

Yeah, so I'm blessed to live in Washington D.C and I'm surrounded by ... It's urban of course, but I am surrounded by woods here so I like to go for runs or bikes on the Chesapeake and Ohio Canals. I do ride to work whenever I can. As you know, Dave, you have a much longer ride than I do, but we see each other in the bike room occasionally. I love to really get out on the water. I also love to go hike on the Appalachian trail. I was out there a couple weekends ago when I was in town with my daughter and my husband, and we like to go out and do hikes when we can.

There's some great TNC properties nearby here in Northern Virginia and in Maryland and D.C. So the Billy Goat Trail, Great Falls Bear Island, these are all places that TNC has been involved with. And then now that we're getting from spring into summer, hopefully very soon it'll be warming up to go back out on my paddle board which I love paddle boarding out on the Potomac, is another thing I love to do.

So I do my best to get out whenever I can, but as you said, it can be hard sometimes. But running and biking certainly help me connect whenever I can.

Dave Strauss:

Right. You need it for sure. It's always great to get outside and smell that fresh air.

Jennifer Morris:

That's right.

Dave Strauss:

There's nothing like just getting outside and seeing places and species that inspire or rejuvenate us. We're lucky to have so many Nature Conservancy protected areas across the country that are open to the public. I personally just had the opportunity to visit the Sandhill Crane Migration on the Platte River in Nebraska. It was amazing and it's just a reminder of how our worlds are so interconnected with nature.

So I wanted to just take a quick poll of our callers. Have you ever visited a Nature Conservancy Preserve? Press one for yes, press two for no. Again, have you ever visited a Nature Conservancy Preserve? Press one for yes and two for no.

Now we are going to get to our next caller. We have Jerry from Maryland. Jerry?

Jerry:

Hello. Thanks for taking my call. Can you hear me okay?

Jennifer Morris:

Yes.

Jerry:

Several weeks ago I listened to a story on Science Friday about deep sea coral, which I've never heard of before. Is the Nature Conservancy specifically doing any work on protecting or trying to protect deep sea coral?

Jennifer Morris:

So Jerry, great question, and I missed that particular Science Friday, so I'm going to have to go back and listen to it because it's something ... I'm a very passionate diver and diving on coral reefs is one of my favorite things in the whole world. Deep sea coral, it's a good question. We have a lot of work on coral reefs. We are doing some really innovative work on coral restoration and basically planting corals. So generating them and planting them in a lot of different ... I've done it myself in one of our preserves in St. Croix in the Caribbean, and it's absolutely some of the most cutting-edge work that TNC is doing in oceans.

We have another initiative called Super Reefs, which I'm super interested about. It's around looking at the science behind why some large-scale reefs survive coral bleaching and are just healthier than other reefs and our marine science team is really trying to dig into that. Some of those are deep sea, if I'm not mistaken.

I don't know, Jerry, for a fact if we have a ton of work on "deep sea coral," but certainly coral reefs is a big area for us and we can find out specifically on deep sea coral and get in touch with you through the Maryland chapter and find out. But absolutely protecting these coral reefs is critical, not only for, of course, the amazing biodiversity and fish nurseries that exist in coral reefs and there's so much new science on the very, very deep sea. But also increasingly there's a lot more evidence about the role that oceans have in carbon sequestration, in particular coral reefs. So the science is relatively still fairly nascent in this space, but really interesting to see that our oceans are critical not only for all of the fish for food, but more importantly for biodiversity, but also for carbon regulation. Of course, the ocean itself has retained so much of the heat of our atmosphere and those coral reefs are a critical component to that.

So thanks so much for that question. I love it.

Dave Strauss:

Yeah, great question, Jerry. Thank you. Let's take a brief minute to get the results of that last poll question. 54% of you said you have visited a Nature Conservancy Preserve. I love to hear that.

Jennifer Morris:

Yeah.

Dave Strauss:

Right?

Jennifer Morris:

Right.

Dave Strauss:

You can learn more about the work near you at nature.org. And so let's hear from another caller. We have Mindy from North Carolina. Mindy?

Mindy:

Yeah. Hi, can you hear me?

Jennifer Morris:

Yes. Hi Mindy.

Mindy:

Hi. I'm so blessed. I live right next to the Smoky Mountain National Park, so it's wonderful to be in North Carolina. But I have noticed when I've done work overseas, how far the dollar goes and wanted to speak maybe a little more about how you make decisions about allocating between the United States and those overseas projects because in some regards we can do a lot of volume work over there with our money because it goes further and it's a tough choice.

Jennifer Morris:

Yeah, Mindy, really great question and I am so glad that you live in such a beautiful place and can experience nature all the time. So this is a really important question. Something we grapple a lot with. I will say that the Nature Conservancy's history, of course is 72 years starting in the US, deeply rooted in the US, will always have a very significant US program. And the majority of our resources are coming from the US from people like yourself who love their backyard and want to invest in their backyard. And that continues to stay. And certainly we don't anticipate that changing at all.

But you're right, there are huge opportunities outside the United States, and I think that our international programs are growing. We're doing a lot more than we have historically outside the US, specifically because we have these 2030 goals now that are such large scale.

And to your point, we want to make sure that we're allocating resources in the most cost-effective way for those 2030 goals. But that doesn't mean that we're not going to continue to invest, especially when we have members who really want to focus on their backyard. But increasingly, we are seeing huge opportunities to do stuff at scale that maybe, again back to my policy point before, we didn't have the critical leadership. Now in places even as challenging at times like Indonesia, where there's a real recognition of the role that deforestation is playing in their emissions as a country. And they've had some of the lowest deforestation rates ever because of a change in policy. Because of a reform in how palm oil is produced. Because of better laws and better punishments for illegal logging. So we're able to now go in and take advantage of that working with the government to really do stuff at scale like we've never done before outside the United States.

So we decide, again, using those 2030 goals as our guide, but we're still going to continue to do a significant amount of work wherever we're needed and where we are able to have the best results for our 2030 goals.

Dave Strauss:

Great, thanks, Jen. We are going to go to our next caller and I think we'll have one more after that. We have Sarah from Maine. Sarah?

Sarah:

Hi, can you hear me?

Dave Strauss:

Hi, we can.

Sarah:

Hi. Great. So my question is, I am engaged with several local land trusts in the southern Maine area, and it feels to me like this 30% conservation mark that's been set is a carte blanche for a lot of industry, business/capitalism to come in and get to that 30% mark and then stop their building / flash and burn, I guess you could say, of the local area. So I'm just wondering, is that just a baseline? Are you hoping to increase that percentage both nationally and internationally, and how aggressively are you pursuing that?

Jennifer Morris:

Yeah, so Sarah, I think it's really varied across the world. I think obviously in Maine you have a wonderful environment, lots of good protection. In most of the rest of the world we're not even close to 30%. So we're way below that. And even when we're close in countries, especially in developing countries which are challenged to just cover basic needs, there's a recognition that even what's protected is not durable because there's not enough financing, there's not enough money to actually go into paying park guards to ensuring that there's basic infrastructure for those parks.

So while we support, of course, that much protection and restoration is possible, we think 30%, which is the global goal, is good. Now in some places to get to that overall 30 across the planet, there's going to be more in places like Maine and Vermont, New Hampshire, and hopefully places like Canada and others that still have big scale forests left and nice freshwater running rivers, et cetera, and some ocean protection too in those places, where we can really shoot beyond the 30 that will make up for other areas.

But generally we want to see every single country, that's 190 countries, that have signed up to 30% protection. That it's not just lines on a map, 30%, and then business as usual. It really is deep protection within those areas. And sure, if we can shoot beyond those and that makes sense for a country to do, we would be absolutely willing and supportive of helping countries get there.

But even getting to that 30% is challenging for most countries, especially I would say on the ocean space where globally less than 10% of the oceans have any sort of long-term protection. So we're not even at 10%. So working on fisheries, working on better marine protection, working on those deep sea corals that was mentioned earlier, we have a lot of work to do to get even to 15%, much less 30.

So I love the ambition though, and we're all in for that.

Dave Strauss:

Great, thanks, Jen. We have Barbara from California. Barbara, are you with us?

Barbara:

I'm here.

Jennifer Morris:

Hi Barbara.

Barbara:

Hi there. First of all, I want to say thank you for all your work. Thank you for these calls. I'm very impressed by how much you know about all the subjects we ask about. You're doing a fabulous job.

Jennifer Morris:

Thank you.

Barbara:

My question is, I am absolutely overwhelmed with all of the climate change and problems we have in this world, and so where do you want us as people who contribute to begin? What's the one thing we can do to help you do the work you're doing?

Jennifer Morris:

Oh, Barbara, thank you so much for that question. Well, clearly thank you for all your support over the years. Thank you to everyone on this call for being with us on this journey, challenging as it is. And I know that what keeps me going and what I would suggest that everyone do of course is being part of something like a movement like the Nature Conservancy or whatever organization that you support. We of course want you to support us, but I'm sure you all are members and supporters of other organizations, is to just keep doing that. First of all, whenever I make my donation to the Nature Conservancy every month ... Dave makes sure that I do that. But I feel like there's hope every time I do that because I know that this organization is doing incredible things.

And for you to hear just a little bit of it tonight and to maybe follow us online or to read our magazine and to see the stories of people who are on the front lines of making sure that that hope is realized. And we have to do that not just for our own wellbeing quite frankly, but that action gives me hope. So whether it's how you are a member every month or how you are engaging and talking about climate change. The fact that so many of you are actually talking about it.

Our chief scientist, Catherine Hayhoe talks about that all the time, that just speaking about climate change, just discussing it and really talking about some of the solutions that are out there, whether they're technology solutions or nature protection solutions, those things matter so much and we'll get the dialogue hopefully less polarized. If you can find a way to connect with people who may not have the same views on protecting nature or climate change that you do, but you know that they care about something that you can relate to, whether it's their children being able to have a clean environment or a forest that they can play in like they did, or whether they can breathe when they walk outside, or whether they can have food that's healthy in the future for them.

All of those things matter and to just talk about that and to be able to connect to people so that we can get away from this polarized dialogue that we find ourselves in, not just in the US but around the world, and really lead with hope and not every action to me. Whether it's a small donation, a big donation, or just going outside with your kids and your grandkids or even just your pets to experience nature and to really put that hope into action, that for me is the best thing that you can do.

And then maybe one thing that I would say, Dave, to take away from this conversation, and this goes to Barbara's question, is keep speaking up for nature. Your voice matters. Voting for candidates in this election year, no matter what state, what country you're in, who support solutions to the climate emergency, that advocate for more sustainable practices which support regenerative agriculture and really reaching out to your political leaders and talking to your friends and family. Those are the things that matter and will make us all have a brighter future.

Dave Strauss:

Couldn't agree with you more, Jen, thank you for that. This has been an incredible conversation. I'm always inspired by our members and the great questions that they ask.

Jen, if there is one thing you want our listeners, our members to take away from this conversation, what would it be?

Jennifer Morris:

Yeah, basically what I just mentioned, which is really to continue to speak up for nature, to continue to do what you can to make the change that you can in your own lives, whatever that might be, whatever that works for you. And to continue, of course, being a part of the Nature Conservancy. We so value everything that you all do for us every day. Without you, the work that we're doing, some of which we've talked about tonight, would not be possible. So thank you so much for being part of our community, for your support, and for joining us for this call. It's been really inspiring, as Dave said, to hear your questions.

And please go out and visit our preserves. They're really magical places. We're trying to do more to invest in infrastructure and ensure accessibility for everyone, and to really be able to have those places and spaces where we've been blessed to have been able to steward these lands forever, that they're available to many of you on the call and the general public.

So please get out there and thank you again for joining us tonight. This has been really a lot of fun. And Dave, thanks for moderating such a great session.

Dave Strauss:

Yeah, thank you. And thanks to everyone who joined on the live call tonight. I can't thank you enough for all you do to support the mission, to support the Nature Conservancy and all the great work. I'm just thrilled. Jennifer is in a leadership role. She's amazing, as you can see. Super energetic and very, very knowledgeable. So thank you Jen, for coming on tonight and chatting with our members. They're the ones that really bring us to life. So I just thank you and thank you to our members.

Unfortunately, we couldn't get to every question, but if you have any additional comments, please press one to leave a voicemail for us. We also value your feedback. So thanks again for your time and have a wonderful evening.

Jennifer Morris:

Thanks, Dave. Thanks everyone. Take care. Bye.

Dave Strauss:

Take care.

Dave Strauss:

Good evening, and welcome to tonight's live question and answer with David Banks, The Nature Conservancy's chief conservation officer. I'm Dave Strauss, director of membership at The Nature Conservancy, and I'll be your moderator tonight. I'm looking forward to hearing your questions, and we'll get started in just a moment. Right now, we're waiting for everyone to join the call, and we're expecting a strong turn-out, so we'll be with you shortly.

This is a live event with lots of opportunities for you to ask questions and share your thoughts. If you have a question for tonight's speaker, please press zero on your telephone keypad. Again, that's press zero on your telephone keypad either now or at any point during the event. Your questions will help guide tonight's discussion, so please ask away.

If you've just joined us, welcome to tonight's live Q and A with The Nature Conservancy's chief conservation officer, David Banks, live with us tonight. He's here to talk about urgent conservation priorities and answer your questions. If you'd like to ask a question, please press zero at any time to enter the queue.

Thanks again to everyone for joining us for this live discussion. Your support means so much, and I'm really glad we've had a chance to connect with each other tonight. Our featured guest, David Banks, has a distinguished career in conservation. We are honored to have him here to talk with you, answer your questions, and share his perspective on how we'll continue working to safeguard the lands and waters that sustains us all.

David is the chief conservation officer and has been with The Nature Conservancy for nearly 30 years, leading conservation work in TNC priority areas around the world. He previously served as the executive vice president for Africa, Europe, and India and led TNC's Africa region for more than a decade.

Further, he managed the Alaska program and served as their conservation director and conservation planner. David is proud to have started his career serving as a Peace Corps volunteer in Ghana. In his free time, he enjoys rafting wilderness rivers in western North America and skiing the backcountries of Montana.

Welcome, David. I know our supporters on the phone will have lots of great questions for you tonight. And again, if you'd like to ask a question during tonight's telephone town hall event or if you have any comments for our speaker, please press zero at any time to get in the queue to ask your questions.

There are several hundred people on the line, so we won't be able to get to everyone, but we will try to take as many callers as possible. We'll also have a couple of chances for you to share your thoughts with a few interactive polling questions as we go along.

So let me hand it over to you, David, so you can welcome those that are with us and share a few thoughts before opening up the lines for questions. David?

David Banks:

Great. Thanks, Dave. And it's good to have a Dave and a David on the call here and trying and keep that straight as we go along. But I really appreciate all of you joining us here tonight or today, wherever you might be. And I'm excited to hear your questions because it's these questions that help me understand what's important to you, what's on your mind, things you're concerned about. And it really does help me, helps us, helps our team to shape our work and respond to our membership because you are at the heart of who we are at The Nature Conservancy.

We're all your staff, working very hard every day in this unique moment. And I know you care deeply about conserving lands and waters upon which all life depends. Our mission is in some really tough times right now. We have these dual crises around climate change and biodiversity loss, the loss of species, plants and animals.

And these issues, these crises that we're dealing with, are impacting all the things around us, and ultimately, they impact us as humans. Our future really is at stake here, and I think all of you are seeing that day in and day out in the places where you live, the news that you read. And it's concerning to all of us.

But I think we can make a difference. I have a lot of hope that we can keep fighting to make a change here. And our staff wakes up every day with hope, working to make a difference. But I've been at this for a long time, and hope is great, but it's not really a guarantee of success. And so it's the actions that we take. And The Nature Conservancy has always been grounded on tangible, lasting results.

And those lasting results matter more today than they ever have before. We've got a lot of work to do and very little time to do it, but it can be done. It can be done. And that's the part that gives me hope because I see it every day out there. It's work that's grounded in science. The science shows us it's possible to meet our climate targets. It's possible to conserve 30% of the lands and waters of this planet by 2030.

And The Nature Conservancy is poised to make a huge contribution, a unique contribution that will bring our skills, our relationships, our assets, the connections that we have on the ground, in the water, and with people in communities all around the world that care deeply about this mission and that can help us make a difference for the future of the planet.

That's why TNC has looked at how we can make our best contributions to reduce the rate of species loss and to cut carbon emissions because those are the two key things that we're focused on right now. Our roots as an organization are in protecting land and water. It's those tangible results that you can walk on or you can swim in. It's what brought me to this organization. And those things still move the needle, but we've got to do things on a bigger scale. We've got to move more quickly in order to make a difference for these things that we care about.

So that's why our conservation team, folks that work with me day in and day out, are focused on a few areas that are important to our success. So protecting forests and grasslands is a critical outcome for us because those forests and grasslands help sequester carbon. They remove carbon from the air, which is one of the key strategies to making a difference for our climate crisis. It's the equivalent of removing 650 million cars off the road.

And it's amazing that we keep working on technology to try and improve carbon capture when nature has provided us this magical thing of a tree or a plant that can do that on their own. And this connects us deeply to our mission of conserving biodiversity as well.

So the other thing that is really important and it relates to the climate crisis is our need to ramp up our land protection work. We're aiming to conserve 650 million hectares of healthy land. This is an area twice the size of India. And we think that's necessary in order to keep the planet healthy.

I had a chance this last year to visit our Indonesia program, where we recently acquired about a 50,000 hectare forest concession on the island of Borneo. This area is under deep threat from palm oil conversion and coal mining, but we were able to protect that forest concession. And I got to visit there and see orangutan nests, a subspecies that's unique to that area, giant hornbill, and meet some of the local communities that are dependent on that area for clean water and clean air.

And it was just one more reminder of the power of the organization. When we're working closely with communities, we're bringing our science and we're bringing our financial wherewithal, we can make a huge difference for the planet.

So the work we have to do is bold, it's ambitious, but more important, it's achievable if we act now. Now's the time to live up to our promise as the world's largest environmental nonprofit and make a meaningful difference for nature. And I'm glad you're with us to help us all live up to that promise. Dave, let's hear some questions.

Dave Strauss:

Yeah. Great. Thank you, David. And I'll tell you, it does not happen without our members to make all this work. I mean, I think about The Nature Conservancy, our scale, our scope, and our skills put together... We will make that difference.

A warm welcome to anyone who just joined us. It's a privilege to have David Banks, The Nature Conservancy's chief conservation officer, with us tonight for this live Q and A discussion on conservation priorities. As a reminder, to ask a question to David, please press zero on your telephone keypad at any time.

While we wait to get our first caller, I wanted to thank you again to everyone participating in this virtual town hall event tonight. On behalf of all our scientists and staff, I want to thank you for your loyalty and generosity. Your support means so much. We are united in our mission to protect the lands and waters on which all life depends, but each of us is inspired to act for different reasons.

So I wanted to ask a quick poll question to get a sense of why you've chosen to be a Nature Conservancy supporter. To respond, just press the corresponding number on your telephone keypad. So the question is, why do you help protect nature? Press one if you're concerned about the climate emergency. Press two if you care about saving endangered species. Press three if you want to preserve beautiful natural places. Press four if you want to keep the air we breathe and water we drink clean. Press five for all of the above. Press six for other.

Again, why do you help protect nature? Press one if you're concerned about the climate emergency. Press two if you care about saving endangered species. Press three if you want to preserve beautiful natural places. Press four if you want to keep the air we breathe and water we drink clean. Press five for all of the above. Or press six for others.

Your answers will help guide our discussion, and we'll have the results for you in just a bit. Be sure to press zero if you'd like to ask a question live tonight.

Tonight's event is meant to be a dialogue about issues that are important to you, so we sent an email survey asking participants what questions they most wanted David to answer tonight. The majority of supporters said this question was top of mind for them, and that's where we'll start tonight. The top question for you, David, is, what's the most critical solution to address climate change?

David Banks:

Yeah. That's a great question. And I mentioned this earlier in my remarks that we think the most important investment that we can make as an organization, and I think you all can help us with that, is to protect nature, so protect forests, protect grasslands, protect mangroves.

That represents about 30% of our target for reducing emissions of fossil fuels. So it's a huge impact, and it's a forgotten solution in many ways because we talk so much about technology and electric cars and things like that, but protecting nature has this great benefit of sequestering carbon, but it also protects biodiversity. So you get the dual benefit there.

So I think that's the most important thing. And then, for all of you, I think it's critical to engage on the policy side, to engage with your communities to convey the importance of addressing climate change. And so, each one of you can send a message to your communities, your neighborhood, and you can help shift policies at the local level and at the national level that will make a huge difference for what we're trying to do here.

Dave Strauss:

Great. Thank you, David. Okay, let's get to our first caller on the line. As a reminder, you can press zero at any time on your telephone keypad to ask us a question live tonight. We'll try to get as many as possible, so listen for your name once you get in the queue. And our first caller tonight, David, is Vince from St. Louis, Missouri. Vince, are you with us?

Vince:

Yes, I am.

Dave Strauss:

Great. Feel free to ask your question, Vince.

Vince:

Okay. As a scuba diver, I was devastated to hear about the high ocean temperatures in the Keys and the die-off of some of the coral there. And I was wondering, as The Nature Conservancy looks to making future investments that are going to look forward 20 or 30 years, how do we have to look at what climate change may do to the property that we're investing in?

David Banks:

Yeah. Thanks, Vince. That's a great question there. And we do have a team of scientists that's part of our climate team and science team that's working to understand the impacts of climate change on both land and waters and how we can design our land protection strategies and our freshwater and ocean protection strategies to anticipate the changes that will happen.

And the one you bring up about the warm water... I was down in Belize last year, where I experienced some of those very high temperatures, some of the highest they've ever seen, and got to see quite a bit of coral bleaching from that. And one of the ways that we're working to address that is to increase the scale of our ocean protection work in places like Belize or Barbados, the Seychelles in the West Indian Ocean, where we're protecting areas the size of Germany in these places.

And by doing that on that scale, it allows us to allow for recovery of coral reefs after they have been damaged by high ocean temperatures. So if you have a bigger area, it's much more resilient to those changes, is a good example of how this can work. Dave, back to you.

Dave Strauss:

Yeah, thank you, Vince, for the question. Really good. And David, appreciate the response. I wanted to quickly share the results of our first poll before getting to our next live caller. I see that 27% of you said they choose to support The Nature Conservancy because you're concerned about the climate emergency. I'm glad to have David here to answer your climate questions tonight. And as a reminder, you can press zero at any time on your telephone keypad to ask the question live. So let's go to our next caller. We have Claire from New York. Claire, are you with us?

Claire:

Yes, I am.

Dave Strauss:

All right. Cool.

Claire:

Can you hear me?

David Banks:

Yes.

Claire:

Okay. All right.

David Banks:

Feel free to ask your question.

Claire:

Yeah. Well, I'm very concerned with the Indigenous lands, especially in South America, but really around the world. And I heard today that in Brazil, the high court did decide in favor of the Indigenous and their lands. And I was just wondering, do you help stop the miners who are desecrating land, for example, in Columbia? Do you work in a way to help the Indigenous everywhere and also to stop pasturing animals, cutting down forests in order to pasture animals and send them off to factory farms? Because I have heard that that is actually more contributing to the methane and all of that into the atmosphere than even the fossil fuels that the...

David Banks:

Great. Thanks, Claire. That's a very good question, and it's something that is very important to me, both at The Nature Conservancy and also personally. I've had a lot of opportunities in my time in Alaska, working with Alaska Native communities, and then in Africa with Indigenous communities there on these very issues.

And the most important thing that we are engaging on right now is to help Indigenous communities get rights to their land, secure rights to their land. Because by getting rights to their land, we can help them fight some of the threats that are coming from mining or grazing.

And I'll give you a good example of this. There's a hunter-gatherer community in Tanzania that I work very closely with that... It's one of the last hunter-gatherer communities left on Earth. And their population has shrunk significantly. Their territory has declined by about 90%.

And so, The Nature Conservancy worked with partners in Tanzania to find a legal agreement through Tanzanian law, where the Hadza people could get rights to their land. They essentially protected their land through a legal agreement with the government of Tanzania. And through that legal agreement, they were able to reclaim rights to their land in Tanzania, and then we were able to help them raise money to secure that land over time.

And so, that's an example of where we're working very closely with the community, help them secure their rights, and then, through that, abate the threats that are coming towards them.

Dave Strauss:

Great. Thank you, David. Claire, thanks for the question. Let's take another caller. We have Nancy from Denver.

Nancy:

Yes. So I'm associated with a small healing nature center that has been invested in rewilding the area that they have purchased for the center, wanting to conserve water and natural resources, but getting a lot of resistance from the town, from the administrator of the town, I should say, because they're wanting the standard of nice green lawns, and what we are trying to do in providing more biodiversity and prairie land looks like weeds to them.

So I guess this is kind of piggybacking on your answer to the very first question. I'm wondering if you have some concrete ways or ideas as to how we can work with not only that particular administration of that city, but we're also looking at establishing a consortium of healing nature centers and helping them to do the same.

David Banks:

Nancy, I really appreciate what you're doing there and what you're up against as well because we're seeing that in many places around the world, where it's about a culture change and a shift in perspective that is often hard for us as humans. And so I think you almost have to approach this both through the head and through the heart. And there's information. There are resources out there that you can go to. There's a number of books now on rewilding that talk about some of the work that organizations like The Nature Conservancy have done that can provide some good examples based on science that I think you could share with the town administrators.

And then, I think also getting those people that are in decision-making roles to come and see what wild nature looks like is an important step there. And I think that's the role that people like you can play in these communities to start to shift people's perspectives. Because once that happens there, then it can happen on a bigger scale when we're trying to restore bison, for example, to the Great Plains of the US.

Dave Strauss:

Great. Thank you. David. We're going to have to take one more quick question and then go to a poll. We have Julie on the phone from California. Julie.

Julie:

Hello.

Dave Strauss:

Hi.

Julie:

This is Julie. Can you hear me?

Dave Strauss:

We can, Julie. Feel free to ask your question.

Julie:

Okay. Hi. In the past couple of years, I've watched many webinars featuring really bright young climate activists from around the world. I see them in these big, big meetings like COP and whatever, but they always seem to be sidelined. They're not given enough power. They're not given enough money. And I was wondering, what is The Nature Conservancy doing to help empower these really bright, really concerned young climate activists? Thank you.

David Banks:

Great question. And my quick answer is we need to do more. And I think it's good to recognize where there's more effort to do. And here at The Nature Conservancy, investing more in youth is something we are investing in, and we're trying to increase that investment.

We have a youth engagement program at The Nature Conservancy that targets young people in different communities so that we can connect them to our work so they learn more about our work and then empower them to speak out on policies that are important for climate and biodiversity.

Over time, we've also had various internship programs that bring some of the best young leaders into the organization so they can learn and grow, and then we help place those interns into organizations where they can make a big difference.

And finally, we also believe strongly that you don't have to be an employee of The Nature Conservancy in order for us to engage with you. So we're investing in local organizations, youth organizations, community organizations that are also working on strategies or efforts that contribute to our mission. And I think that's another area where we can help support some of these young people that are making the biggest difference there.

Dave Strauss:

Yeah, this leads right into our next poll question, which is around policy action, and it gives opportunities for young and old folks, whatever it is, to actually take action. And policy is such an important part of how we make a meaningful change. Many of our members are actively speaking out through our online Action Center. I'm curious how many people have signed or want to sign one of our advocacy positions or pledges, so I want to take a minute to just do a quick poll.

So press one if you signed a policy action in our online Action Center this year. Press two if you have not visited our online Action Center. Press three if you don't recall but would be interested in learning more about our Action Center.

Again, press one if you've signed a policy action in our online Action Center. Press two if you have not visited our online Action Center. Or press three if you don't recall but would be interested in learning more about our Action Center.

And so we'll go to our next caller. Let's take Dale from Denver, Colorado.

Dale:

Yeah, okay.

Dave Strauss:

Sorry, say that again? Dale? Dale, are you with us, Dale?

David Banks:

I can't tell.

Dave Strauss:

Oh, there you are. Dale, are you there?

David Banks:

Yep, we can hear you.

Dave Strauss:

Great. Dale, do you have a question?

David Banks:

Oh. Let's move on.

Dave Strauss:

So we must have a connection issue with Dale. We're going to move on to Randy from Washington. Randy, are you with us?

Randy:

Yes, I am. Thank you.

Dave Strauss:

Oh, fantastic. Randy, feel free to ask your question.

Randy:

First off, I cannot express more passionately my respect for The Nature Conservancy. I've been a member for about 30 some odd years now, and every time I think about The Nature Conservancy, I just become a stronger advocate.

I live in Issaquah, Washington, which is about 30 miles east of Seattle. I've been a volunteer at the Issaquah state-run salmon hatchery, the objective of which is to keep salmon, specifically Chinook salmon, in the system. They are declared a endangered species back in the late '80s, and their numbers have been continuously falling. It also happens that the southern transient pod of orcas, which hangs out in the Seattle area and Puget Sound, for some reason, is reliant almost exclusively on Chinook, so their numbers are suffering too.

So here's the deal. Last year, at the hatchery, we had 4,700 Chinook come back out of about 1,800,000 that we released four years ago. This year, so far, we believe we have 24,000 Chinook that have returned to the Lake Washington and Issaquah watershed. And as good a news as that is, we don't know why.

So here's the question. Nature Conservancy obviously is very active in Washington State, but if you had to decide on which is more important when it comes to specific species, marine species, survival and restoration, is it acquisition of habitat, or is it changing terrestrial habitat, or is it more on the waterside?

David Banks:

Wow. That's a great question and a hard one to answer quickly. But one, I want to say how much I appreciate your support. And to let us know how much you're behind us means a bunch to the people that work here day in and day out, so thank you for that.

But if I had to choose, particularly related to salmon, the most important issue is barriers to movement on salmon. And we've seen this in the Pacific Northwest. We've seen it for Atlantic salmon as well. And we're actively involved from Alaska, all the way down the coast, and in the Atlantic on working to remove barriers.

And it can be things as big as removing dams, that is a big priority for us and something we've invested in heavily, but also things like culverts and removing those because you can remove one culvert that can open up habitat for hundreds of miles for salmon to migrate up, and that makes a huge difference in increasing their numbers. And by increasing their numbers, you make them more resilient to climate change, and you create opportunities for food for some of the marine mammals that depend on them.

And as you probably know, this cycle is so critical to address, and it's so complex that you can't just do one thing. You have to work at all levels of the system. But it's the barriers that have made the biggest difference to declines in salmon over this time. And we're doing a lot now to try and address it. And by the way, a lot of other organizations have identified this as well, and it's going to take a lot of policy change, particularly in the Pacific Northwest, to make a difference on a big scale there.

Dave Strauss:

Great. Thank you, David.

David Banks:

I can talk a lot about this one because I've caught a few Chinook salmon in my time. And being in Alaska, it's one of those places where you actually get to see what it's like to have wild, free-flowing rivers with a lot of salmon in them.

Dave Strauss:

That's great. Thank you, David. And thank you, Randy, for the question and being a member for 30 years. We really do appreciate you. I want to quickly get the results for our second poll question. 21% of you said you have taken one of our policy actions. The pledges and letters to Congress that are online in Action Center are an easy way for you to support policy priorities. We're calling on Congress to support strong conservation funding right now, so please visit nature.org\act to add your name. We want to go to the next caller. So let's take another question from Roberta out of Missouri. Roberta, are you with us? Roberta?

Bobbie:

Hey. Yeah, I think this is me. This is Bobbie. Yeah, my question really was about coming back to young people, and how do you balance the messaging between the fact that this is such an urgent crisis and urgent action is needed with hope? I hear so much discouragement and really a sense of hopelessness of actually being able to make a difference, and seeing a better future, and wanting to bring another generation into the world.

David Banks:

Yeah. Bobbie, I think it is, thank you very much. It's something we all struggle with that are deeply involved in these issues. And there's even a term for this, climate anxiety, that many of us have developed because we're concerned about the future of the planet. And I have two young kids. They're just out of high school.

And I've talked to them about it and say, "How can you be hopeful with where you're going?" And their response to me is, "Dad, it's the only thing we can do." We have more technology. We have better science. And young people now care deeply about these issues in a way that people my generation haven't always cared about. And so I think it's that shifting engagement mentality that does give us some hope.

And then, I think the other thing for me is you have... We have to think about these things on a bigger timescale in that the things we do now can make a big difference in the future, and it's going to take a while to turn things around. And we may go through some hard periods, but the actions we take now will make a difference.

So I often use the analogy of a leaking roof. No one wants to patch up a leaking roof, but the sooner you address that, the more you avoid problems down the road. And so, when I talk to young people, they're like, "Fix the roof." And that's what we need to do right now.

Dave Strauss:

Great. Thank you. David. Let's take another question from the phone. We have Diana from Camarillo, California.

Diana:

Hi. Can you hear me?

Dave Strauss:

We can.

David Banks:

Yes.

Diana:

Okay. I just wanted to add my praise because I think The Nature Conservancy is a marvelous organization. My question relates to the very amazing goals you have set for 2030 and when we are going to find out later this fall that all of the promises that governments have made in the past have not been fulfilled. And so, are you running a risk of setting up goals that are really not realistic?

David Banks:

Yeah, it's a great question. We set these goals knowing that they were ambitious and knowing that we had to engage with government, with other partners, with local communities in order to make a difference. And we simply... We don't have a choice when it comes to where we're going. We have to achieve these goals. The future of the planet and humans and nature depends on that.

So I think what you're talking about is absolutely true, and we saw it last week in the UN General Assembly and last year's Conference of the Party around climate is governments are not stepping up to make a big enough difference in order to address our climate goals. And our hope is that in this next year, the reality is going to hit hard with them. And we can use that as a pivot opportunity to motivate governments, communities, and people to make a difference in order to achieve those goals. But it's going to take work and support from everyone out there to make a difference on there. It's not going to be easy.

Dave Strauss:

Thanks, Diana, for the question. There are a lot of good questions, and I see there are a ton of people in the queue. We have several hundred people on the line, and so we won't be able to get to everyone, but I want to make sure that we try to get as many callers as possible. So, again, to ask a question, please press zero to get into the queue.

Before we go to another question, I want to go back to the responses to our first poll because many of you said that you're a Nature Conservancy supporter because you care about endangered species. David, you've worked on so many continents, you've seen conservation in action, from the wild interiors of Alaska to small villages in Africa to bustling cities across Europe. I'm wondering if you could share some thoughts about the best ways to protect threatened species no matter where it is.

David Banks:

Yeah, that's a great question too. And I've been privileged to work in some pretty incredible parts of the world, where we have species like the brown bear and salmon and rhino and lions. I think the story I give... When I worked in Africa, I was, and actually still am, somewhat obsessed with elephants. I think they're a fascinating species, and the fact that they still exist in Africa is a real miracle, and it's a testament to what people in communities are willing to tolerate there.

But for me, coming in, I thought it was all about protecting habitat and protecting elephants from poaching. And it took me one visit with a local community where I spent a whole day and a night sharing a meal with a family who were talking about elephants from a different perspective because those same elephants that we were working to protect were trampling their crops. And those crops were their only source of food. They talked about an uncle who had been killed by an elephant when the uncle was trying to protect the crops from the elephant.

And this really hit home with me that the only way we can really conserve wild and threatened species is for people to see value in them and to see livelihood associated with them. And that's what we started working on in Africa, is how we could use elephants to provide jobs, connect people to communities, and then help them protect their livelihoods, their crops, from the threats that came from elephants. And by doing that, they became very strong supporters of our strategies there. And I think this is true whether or not you're in a city or a rural area. Nature needs to matter to people, and we need to be able to tell that story better so people realize it.

Dave Strauss:

Thank you, David, appreciate that. Let's take another question from the phone. We have Timothy from Ohio. Timothy, are you there?

Timothy:

Yes. Is that from Cincinnati?

Dave Strauss:

Great.

Timothy:

Okay, great. Thank you for taking my question. I've been involved with nonprofits before, I love the work that you do, but there's always limits of resources. And I just wondered, from a broad perspective, do you feel like your dollar goes farther with international projects, or is it just as effective to work domestically? Just that's the question I had for you.

David Banks:

Yeah. Timothy, great question. And I don't think it's really either/or. I would say it's important for all of us to really look at projects and what the return, the conservation return, is from the investments, the donations that we make. And sometimes, those smaller projects can make a huge difference in the United States because it's something that's so rare and threatened that if we don't do it, we could lose that forever. So I don't want to discount the value of places that are expensive and maybe smaller because that's still a key part of our strategy.

Now, having said that, our dollars, our euros can go further in many of the places we work outside the United States. And we've used this statistic that about 85% of the biodiversity on Earth is outside the United States. And so there's no question that we need to invest more there, and we can get big results because of the power of the dollar in these places to make a difference. But the US is still very important.

Dave Strauss:

Thanks for the question, Timothy. And we're going to go to another poll question. So much of our work at The Nature Conservancy is done in partnership with private land owners and communities, and we're also lucky to have many Nature Conservancy-protected areas across the country that are open to the public.

So I wanted to take a quick poll. Have you ever visited a Nature Conservancy preserve? Press one for yes. Press two for no. Or press three for not sure. Again, have you ever visited a Nature Conservancy preserve? Press one for yes. Press two for no. Press three for not sure. And let's take another caller. We have Ashley from Colorado. Ashley, are you with us?

Ashley:

Oh. Yep. Can you guys hear me?

Dave Strauss:

Yes.

Ashley:

Perfect. So my question is in the context of public and private partnerships. So I'm curious if you have any specific practical or should be implemented to incentivize businesses toward greener practices, help accelerate the development and deployment of clean and responsible technology, and promote market-based mechanisms like carbon pricing? And then, if so, if you could share any examples of successful applications of these strategies and discuss how we ensure that these transitions will support job growth, don't disproportionately affect certain communities, and also align with things like the Paris Agreement.

David Banks:

Yeah, great question, Ashley. We've got a good turnout from Colorado tonight, so that's good. The Nature Conservancy has always worked very closely with governments and corporations to try and shift practices that help us meet our mission. And I think one of the examples that we've worked on lately is around carbon offsets and using payments from corporations in order to protect forests.

And one of the great examples of this is work we did in Belize last year to protect a huge forest tract on the border with Mexico and Guatemala, that it was very important to jaguars and toucans. And this area was very threatened by conversion to dairy farms and row crop agriculture. And I flew over that this year, and you can see a hard edge of where the forest has been cut down there for dairy farms and row crop agriculture.

And we knew that this was the threat to this area. And so we worked with a couple of corporations that donated money to us to protect that forest, to keep it from being converted as a way to hit some of their carbon credit targets that they had there. And so it's just one example of where we can use support from corporations to get results. And at the same time, we want to influence those corporations to also reduce their emissions because we're not going to be able to offset our way towards our climate goals. We need to have policies in place, and we need practices in place with corporations to reduce their emissions. And we're working on that as well.

Dave Strauss:

Great. Thank you, Ashley. Great question again from Colorado. I think they've taken the lead for good and difficult questions. How you doing over there, David? Good? Ready for some more questions?

David Banks:

Good.

Dave Strauss:

All right.

David Banks:

Bring them on.

Dave Strauss:

We've got Robert from Albuquerque, New Mexico. Robert, are you with us?

Robert:

Yes, I'm here.

Dave Strauss:

Excellent. Feel free to ask your question, Robert.

Robert:

Okay. My question was fairly simple. One of the things I find when talking to people about the climate issue is a lack of understanding of the science. And very often, the science explanations are very difficult for people to understand. I was wondering if you had a simple, kind of direct way of helping people see what the climate problem really is, where it comes from, and what it affects. Thank you.

David Banks:

You know, Robert, that's a great question, and I would encourage all of you to explore some of our chief scientist's work. Her name is Katharine Hayhoe, and she has a number of YouTube videos. She has a great book that's out right now. I think we had her on one of these calls at one time. She's one of the masters of how to communicate simply a very complex problem.

But let me see if I can give it a shot. What I try and say to people is, "Look, humans are changing the climate. We're changing it by emitting carbon, mostly through things like vehicles or electrical production or industrial production. And so that puts carbon into the atmosphere, and carbon into the atmosphere changes the climate." And we can get into a lot of details there that I think distracts people, but the real issue is that it's going to make things warmer in a lot of places, and it's drastically going to change the way that weather events can occur.

And so you can use that to point to things that people have seen recently with hurricanes and floods and droughts and big snow events and forest fires. And so people associate with those events, but what they don't realize is that these things are increasing in frequency and they're much harder to predict than they ever were before.

And because of that, it will disrupt our economies. It will disrupt our agriculture production. And it will make it much more expensive for us to live. And people are going to move because their lives are so disrupted, and that will create other political instability because of it. So it's a complex problem, but it leads to even more complex problems that make it harder for us to solve. And that's why we need to address it now.

Dave Strauss:

Great. Thank you, David. You would made Katharine Hayhoe proud from your response. Let's take a brief minute to get the results of that poll question. 56% of you have visited a Nature Conservancy preserve. I personally love to hear that. I love going to our preserves. If you want to learn more about any of the ones near you or anywhere in the country, visit nature.org. We have another caller. We have Steve from Chicago, Illinois. Steve, are you with us?

Steve:

Yeah.

Dave Strauss:

Great. Feel free to ask your question, Steve.

Steve:

I take your point that time is short, and it's clear that scientifically unsupported projects eat up time we don't have. Therefore, I don't support an all-of-the-above approach to biodiversity or climate remediation. The worst examples are tree planting for the sake of tree planting instead of putting the effort into protection around intact forest landscapes or Red projects that are unaudited or audited by dubious sources.

Well, I would suspect that the TNC has a big voice among not-for-profits and NGOs in discriminating between worthwhile, highly effective projects and dysfunctional projects. Am I right? Does the Conservancy carry extra weight among your peers?

David Banks:

Steve, thank you for that. And I believe we do, and our peers believe that we do. And also, governments and corporations believe we do because they're listening to us and depending on us for advice on that and for us to set the standard for how things are done. I mean, here, I completely agree with you. There's a lot of efforts out there that frankly aren't going to make a difference in addressing climate change or protecting biodiversity.

And I think one of the things that's the hallmark of The Nature Conservancy is we are grounded in science. And one of our values is integrity beyond reproach. And so we take that very seriously. And sometimes we make mistakes. We've made them out there. We have projects that have failed. We've had problems.

And when that happens, we admit it, we learn from it, we adapt, and we share those mistakes with others because that's how we learn, and that's how we get better. And it's that integrity that we can stand on, and it gives us the ability to influence policies and practices going forward. So I'm so glad you raised that, and keep pushing us on that because it's very important.

Dave Strauss:

Yeah, I would agree. Thank you for that question, Steve. Really, really good. So this has been an incredible conversation. We, unfortunately, are running low on time. There are still more questions, and we will get to those via email. But David, I do want to say, if there's one thing that you want to leave our listeners to take away from this conversation, what would it be?

David Banks:

Well, first of all, thank you because we have a very smart group of members with great questions, and I love your engagement and the passion you bring to this work, so thank you for that. It does take a lot of passion. It takes a lot of courage to address some of these threats that we're seeing, particularly around biodiversity laws and climate change.

You know, Dave, I want people to remember these challenges are connected, the loss of biodiversity and climate change, so every action we take matters in helping to turn the tide, to make a difference in a way that benefits nature and all of us who depend on nature for our future. So all of you, by being here, your generous support for The Nature Conservancy, all you've done to tell our story, to communicate it to people, it makes such a huge difference.

And I firmly believe, and I'm sure Dave would feel this too, that together, all of us, members and staff, we can find a way to make a difference on climate and biodiversity. Remember that hope really isn't about perfection. It's about knowing that we have the power to make a difference. And all of you are a part of that. So thank you for helping us make a difference in the world. Let's keep the hope alive.

Dave Strauss:

Thank you, David. Couldn't agree with you more. We do have one final poll question. Do you feel that this live Q and A was informative and insightful? Press one for yes. Press two for no.

Thank you to everyone joining us live for this call. I can't thank you enough for all you do to support our cause. We are working hard, as you can tell. We'll be following up with you with a survey email, so if you're not on our email list, go to nature.org and sign up.

And thank you, David, for being our guest this evening. Really insightful, really helpful, and all that you do in leading this organization through conservation, we really just appreciate that.

Unfortunately, we won't be able to get to every question tonight, but if you have any additional comments, please press one to leave a voicemail for us. We always value your feedback. Thanks again for your time. Thank you, David. Thank you, our members. And have a great night. Take care.

Dave Strauss:

Good evening and welcome to tonight's live Q and A with Katherine Hayhoe, The Nature Conservancy's chief scientist. I'm Dave Strauss, director of membership at The Nature Conservancy, and I'll be moderating tonight. I'm looking forward to hearing all of your questions. This is a live event with lots of opportunities for you to ask questions and share your thoughts. If you have a question for tonight's speaker, please press zero on your keypad either now or at any point during the event. Your questions will help guide tonight's discussion, so please ask away. If you've just joined us, welcome to tonight's live Q and A with The Nature Conservancy's chief scientist, Katherine Hayhoe. She's here to talk about critical work to tackle the climate crisis and to answer your questions. If you'd like to ask a question, press zero at any time to enter into the queue. Thanks again for everyone for joining us for this live discussion; your support means so much, and I'm glad, I'm really glad we have had a chance to connect with you each tonight.

Our featured guest, Dr. Katherine Hayhoe, is a distinguished climate expert and a chief scientist at The Nature Conservancy. We are honored to have her here to talk with you, answer your questions, and share her perspective on how we will continue to work to tackle the climate crisis together. Katherine Hayhoe is an atmospheric scientist whose research focuses on understanding the impacts of climate change on people and the planet. She is the chief scientist for The Nature Conservancy, where she leads and coordinates the organization's scientific efforts. She is a tenured professor at Texas Tech University and has received numerous awards and recognitions for her work, including being named the United Nations Champion of the Earth.

Welcome, Katherine. I know your supporters on the phone will have great questions for you tonight. Again, if you'd like to ask a question during tonight's telephone town hall event or if you have any comments for our speaker, please press zero at any time to get in the queue to ask your question. There are several hundred people on the line, so we won't be able to get to everyone tonight, but we will try to take as many callers as possible. We'll also have a couple chances for you to share your thoughts with a few interactive polling questions as we go along. Let me hand it over to you, Katherine, to welcome those who have just joined us and share a few thoughts before we open up the line for questions. Katherine?

Kathrine Hayhoe:

Thank you so much, Dave, and hi, everybody. It's great to be with you virtually. Thank you for your support for The Nature Conservancy. You can probably see in the news every day the importance of the work that we all do together and as a climate scientist, I've been especially seeing that the last few days. Just yesterday a big IPCC report came out. It's what we call a synthesis report. In other words, over the last year and a half, the IPCC has produced their science report, they've produced the impacts report talking about how climate change is affecting every aspect of our lives on this planet, they've produced a report that looks at our emissions and the solutions that are required urgently, and then yesterday they produced the summary of all of this. This summary explains clearly how the impacts of climate change are already here now. They're already in the places where we live. They're affecting our health, our water, our food, and they're affecting the biodiversity of the planet.

At The Nature Conservancy, our goal is to protect the land and water on which all life depends, and we're not going to be able to accomplish that goal if we don't tackle climate change. That's the issue that stands between us and a better future. The IPCC report was also clear that our choices matter and that the window of time we have to make the right choices for a better future is closing quickly, but it's still in our hands and many of the solutions are right in front of us.

The way I think about climate solutions is by using the metaphor of a swimming pool. You might not have expected that, but I grew up with a swimming pool in our backyard, an above ground swimming pool, and maybe you did too. If you think of the swimming pool like the atmosphere, it actually explains our climate solutions to us. In the swimming pool, we have just the right amount of water, so our toes can just touch the bottom. The water are our heat trapping gases in the atmosphere, we have just the right amount of heat trapping gases that keep us at the perfect temperature for life. But at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution a few hundred years ago, we stuck a hose into our swimming pool and we've been turning the hose up every year. Not only is the level of heat trapping gases in the atmosphere increasing, but it's increasing faster and faster every year. The first thing we need to do is we need to turn the hose off through efficiency, through clean energy, and through agricultural practices that don't produce heat trapping gases, including reducing and eliminating deforestation.

But we also have a drain and we need to make that drain bigger. What is the drain? The drain is nature. Nature wants to take our carbon out of the atmosphere and put it back in the soil and ecosystems where we want it instead of the atmosphere where we have too much of it. Nature-based solutions, including restoring and protecting ecosystems all the way from our forest to our coastal wetlands and smart agricultural practices, all of those make the drain bigger. In fact, our scientists at The Nature Conservancy has calculated exactly how much bigger we could make that drain. We could make the drain so big that it would take up a third of our human carbon emissions.

But there's one more thing we have to do. We have to learn how to swim because the level of water in the pool is so high, our toes don't touch the ground anymore. That's building resilience and adapting to the impacts of climate change and there nature can help us as well, whether it is greening low income neighborhoods to protect them from heat and flood to green infrastructure along our coastlines to protect ourselves from storm surge. There's so much that nature can do to help us fix climate change and so much that we can do to protect nature as well. That's what gives me hope, knowing that the solutions are there and those solutions are ones that each of us can support, each of us can catalyze, each of us can engage with in the places where we live. We know scientifically that this matters.

There's a conclusion of these big IPCC reports is very simple. Every bit of warming matters, every action matters, every choice matters. How do we as individuals catalyze these changes? We do so when we advocate for change, where we live, where we work, maybe the school we attend or our kids attend or our grandchildren, the church that we're part of the community, that we're part of the organization that we contribute to. How does change happen? It happens when someone advocates for that change and that is the power of the individual. All of us have that power to advocate for a better future. When I see that happening, that's what gives me hope and I see that happening all across the United States, all across North America, and all around the world. That's why I'm so excited to be part of The Nature Conservancy.

Dave Strauss:

Thank you, Katherine. I'll tell you, you're so inspiring. I've heard you speak many times and you take complex problems and really make them into a simple, easy way to understand. I just thank you from a just a layman perspective. It's so helpful, it really is.

I'd like to, again, welcome to everybody who's just joined us. It's a privilege to have Katherine Hayhoe here with us at The Nature Conservancy's chief scientist to take questions and answers this evening on our conservation priorities. As a reminder, to ask questions, please press zero on your telephone keypad at any time. While we wait to get our first caller, I wanted to say thank you again to everyone participating in this virtual town hall event tonight. On behalf of all our staff and scientists, I wanted to thank you for your loyalty and generosity. Your support means so much. We are united and our mission to protect the lands and waters on which all life depends, but each of us is inspired to act for different reasons.

I wanted to ask a quick poll question to get a sense of why you've chosen to be a Nature Conservancy supporter. To respond, just press the corresponding number on the telephone keypad. The question is, why do you help protect nature? Press one if you're concerned about the climate emergency. Press two if you care about saving endangered species. Press three if you want to preserve beautiful natural places. Press four if you want to keep the air we breathe and water we drink clean. Press five for all the above, and press six for other.

Again, why do you help protect nature? Press one if you're concerned about the climate emergency. Press two if you care about saving endangered species. Press three if you want to preserve beautiful natural places. Press four if you want to keep the air we breathe and water we drink clean. Press five for all of the above, and press six for other. Your answers will help guide our discussion and we'll have the results for you in just a bit, but be sure to press zero if you'd like to ask a question to Katherine live tonight.

Tonight's event is meant to be a dialogue about issues that are important to you, so prior to this conversation, we sent an email survey asking participants what questions they wanted Katherine to answer this evening. The majority of supporters said this question was top of mind for them, and that's where we'll start. The question is, Katherine, what can individuals do right now to make the biggest impact on climate?

Kathrine Hayhoe:

Hm. That question is an interesting question because when I first started to speak to people about climate change, people would say, "Well, if it's this serious, what am I supposed to do?" My first thought was, as a scientist, "Well, we diagnose the problem, we don't fix it," but I realized all of us have a responsibility to do everything we can so I needed to find out what the answer to that question was. I'm getting a bit of an echo there. I thought, "Well, we can obviously reduce our own impact on the problem and we can find a carbon calculator online," there's a really good one called the Cool Calculator from Berkeley, and you can find out what your carbon footprint is and you can change how we get our energy, we can change how we eat, we can change how we live to reduce our personal footprint.

But then I started crunching the numbers because I'm a scientist and I realized that I could do everything I could to reduce my personal carbon footprint, and believe me, I do quite a bit, but even if all of us who were worried did everything we could, that wouldn't even take care of a quarter of emissions. Why not? Because we don't have the ability to change a system and make the best choice and the easiest choice and the most affordable choice for everyone, the right choice, for that, we have to change the system.

I thought, "Well, how does change happen in the past?" Because our society has changed before. It's changed very significantly before. How did women get the vote? How were Civil Rights enacted? How has society changed? I realized that it wasn't when a president or a CEO or a very influential, wealthy, powerful person decided, it was when ordinary people decided the world could and should be different. What did they do? They certainly lived out their values, but they did one extra thing and that extra thing made all the difference. They used their voice to advocate for change. Every single one of us has a voice and we are all part of organizations that are large in ourselves. We all live somewhere, or we might be all part of a family or a social group. We might work somewhere, we might study somewhere, we might worship somewhere, we might walk our dog with a group of people or play hockey with a group of people or be part of the Rotary Club. We are all part of groups that are bigger than ourselves.

When we use our voices to talk about why this issue matters here and now, not in the future over there, but where I live and what we together could be doing to make a difference, that is how we catalyze change. Ultimately that is how we change the world. In fact, it's the only way that people in our modern day society have ever changed the world, and each of us has the power to do that.

Dave Strauss:

So true. Thank you, Katherine. We are actually ready to go to our first caller on the line. As a reminder, please press zero at any time on your telephone keypad to ask a question live tonight. Our first caller is Jean Brunelle. Jean, are you with us? Nope. Don't know that Jean is with us, so we are going to go to Kenneth S. from Florida. Kenneth.

Carol:

I think you may mean Carol.

Dave Strauss:

Carol. Carol.

Carol:

Yes. Yes. Kenneth was me. I'm fine. Kenneth was my husband.

Dave Strauss:

Oh, got it. Carol, please, ask your-

Carol:

Yes. Okay. There's so many people who do not believe in this climate change, in fact, many of my own relatives. How is it we going to get them to understand how serious it is?

Kathrine Hayhoe:

That is a great question and I'm in exactly the same boat. I live in Texas where many people feel the same way. Of course I even have members of my own family who feel that way too. This has been something I've been thinking about for a long time and what I've realized is even though the people who voice these doubts are very loud and very persistent and we know many of them ourselves and on social media or in the comment sections of articles, we see them all the time, it turns out that when we survey people across the whole United States, only 8% of people are dismissive, only 8%.

Now, what does dismissive mean? Well, I think dismissive is a good word because it's very descriptive of what happens. A dismissive person will dismiss anything. They will dismiss 200 years of climate science. They'll dismiss the evidence of 2,000 climate scientists or 2 million scientific papers. They'll even dismiss the evidence of their own eyes. A dismissive person, my personal definition is if an angel from God with brand new tablets of stone that said, "Global warming is real," appeared in front of them, they would dismiss them. If that person is someone we know and if they're a relative, and I speak from personal experience here, in my opinion, the best thing we can say to someone who's truly dismissive is, "I love you, you're wrong, and let's talk about something else."

But here's the good news. 92% of us are not dismissive, and that's from the United States, in Canada or other places the number's even higher. Now, people might not realize it's real because they're listening to sources that are telling them it isn't. But if they're not dismissive, it means they're willing to listen. Listen to what? Not more facts about the ice sheets and global temperature change, but information about how we both are being affected by this issue and how there's positive, constructive solutions that truly can make a difference.

How do you know what somebody already cares about? By asking them and by listening to what they say. The first step to any positive constructive conversation is to bond over something that we share, a shared value, a shared love, the fact that we both have children or grandchildren, the fact that we both enjoy a beach vacation or good wine. Start with something that people also care about and then connect the dots to how climate change is affecting what they already care about and then bring in a positive, constructive solution, and at The Nature Conservancy, we have so many of them, that are making a difference for people today in your local community or your state, and is also making a difference for climate change tomorrow.

Now that might sound too simple, but I've tried this a few thousand times, and if we can genuinely begin with something we share, that conversation can go in a positive direction. For more resources, I would encourage you to check out my TED Talk. I have a TED Talk where I explain how to do this. I have a short series on YouTube called Global Weirding, and I have a lot of different Global Weirding episodes that answer frequently asked questions, and one of them is, if I just tell people the facts, will they change their mind? The answer to that is it's not the facts about climate change that change people's minds, it's connecting our head to our heart and our heart to our hands. That's what changes people's minds. I have a lot of other resources also available to address this issue because that is an issue that you are not alone in asking. That is one of the most common questions I hear.

Dave Strauss:

Thank you. Thank you, Katherine. That's really helpful. I want to quickly share the results of our first poll. [inaudible 00:18:26] Is this Daniel from Colorado?

Daniel:

Yes.

Dave Strauss:

Yeah. Daniel, please go ahead and ask your question to Katherine.

Daniel:

Katherine, thank you for an excellent program. My earlier attempt at wording this question was done a little clumsily, but I was trying to ask what kind of regional solutions can we look for with partnerships between organizations like the Conservancy and regional government or state government that can help solve some of those problems and maybe get the ball rolling to a little larger solution nationally?

Kathrine Hayhoe:

Absolutely. That is a great question and TNC is already partnering with city governments, with state governments, and with federal governments in the United States and around the world. Let me just give you a couple of examples and really, I feel like we could have a eight hour call on all the different ways that TNC is already doing this, which is amazing.

I'm here in Texas and in Texas, TNC is partnering with the city of Dallas to help the city of Dallas build green infrastructure where instead of building concrete to keep water at bay, building green spaces that can absorb the water when we get heavy rainfall events because flooding is actually very common in Dallas. Green infrastructure to absorb the flooding and to help cool off during heat waves because green spaces absorb a lot more of the heat than gray concrete.

Then going from the city level all the way to the national level, what TNC does with many other countries that are very rich in biodiversity but not wealthy in terms of economic resources is TNC acts as a broker or sort of a middle person to help set up what's called a debt for nature swap. This is a really unique idea where you take a country that has crippling national debt with a very high interest rate, but they also have unique biodiverse resources, and TNC arranges for a restructuring of the national debt at a lower interest rate, so they're paying a lot less on their regular payments, in exchange for that country, such as Belize or Bahamas, setting aside part of their land as protected area.

For example, TNC just brokered a deal for Bahamas where they went from almost zero protected marine area to 30% protected marine area and restructured their national debt and saved money, which is just absolutely phenomenal. TNC partners with states on issues like wildfire management in California, on issues like resilient and climate smart agriculture across the Great Plains in the Midwest, on issues like restoring coastal wetlands to protect from storm surges across the Gulf Coast. There are partnerships happening between cities, counties, states, and private organizations all across the US and beyond. That's really, I think, our secret superpower is that partnership because we recognize that we can't do it alone, we need to be engaging in these solutions together with local communities. Thank you for asking that question.

Dave Strauss:

Great, thank you Katherine, and thank you, Daniel, for the question. We have Leslie G. from Maryland. Leslie?

Leslie:

Yes.

Dave Strauss:

Welcome.

Leslie:

Can you hear me? Thank you.

Dave Strauss:

Yes. Feel free to ask your question.

Leslie:

Thank you, Dr. Hayhoe, I had a question about how parents can engage their children, let's say from age five through high school to work together as a family and the children also individually in their schools and other groups that they're in to be active in protecting our environment.

Kathrine Hayhoe:

That is a great question and it's one that's very near and dear to my own heart as a mother myself. In fact, it's so important to me that part of the way that I volunteer my time in climate action is through helping to organize a group called Science Moms. You can find Science Moms online science moms.com, and it's a group of us who are all mothers and are all climate scientists. What we wanted to do is we wanted to organize resources for other parents, you don't have to be a mother. You can be a father, a grandparent, an aunts and uncle, godparents, anyone, anyone who's working with children on this. We wanted to organize resources for people to use to engage with kids. If you go to sciencemoms.com, we have little videos, we have recommended books and documentaries, and we even have articles and essays on how to talk to kids.

Let me summarize it for you though in a nutshell. It's a fact that kids are humans too and just like we do as adults, kids need to know that this is a serious issue, but even more importantly, they need to know that we can fix it. I mentioned my Global Weirding series a little bit ago that I do on YouTube, and one of our episodes is called "I'm Just a Kid, What Can I do?" For that episode, I researched all the different things that kids are doing. And let me tell you, kids are amazing. There are eight or nine year old kids who are hosting YouTube shows where they interview people about climate action. There are kids who are suing state and federal governments for the right to a better future. There are kids who are writing books, there are kids who are serving on committees for their city, there are kids who are doing incredible things around the world, including inventing algae biofuel in their science experiments or creating low cost devices that people can use to charge their phones using wind or solar energy. Kids are just doing amazing things.

The more I find out about what kids are doing, the more inspired I am and the more encouraged I am to share this with all the kids in my life so that they know that they don't have to wait until they're an adult to make a difference. They can make a difference right now. Please do check out Science Moms, there's lots of great resources there. Check out the, "I'm Just a Kid, What Can I Do?" Global Weirding episode. Once you start looking for what kids are doing, it is just so inspiring. The amazing thing about kids is they don't know that they can't do it. You know what? A lot of times they're right, they can do it. We adults are the ones who hesitate and think, "Oh no, that's too big," or, "That's not something that we could do." I think our greatest role is to encourage, to support, and to inspire the kids in our lives because we truly know that kids are amazing and when they put their mind to it, they can accomplish great things, but we need to be there supporting them in that.

Dave Strauss:

Sounds like we should put our kids in charge of climate crisis. What do you think, Katherine?

Kathrine Hayhoe:

Oh, that has occurred to me and I wouldn't mind. I would support that.

Dave Strauss:

Would certainly come up with some ingenious ideas I'm sure. We have another caller here. We've got David A. from Missoula. David, are you with us?

David A.:

Hi Katherine. I was wondering if you could talk to the difference between deforestation and sustainable forest management that still involves cutting down trees and using the wood to replace concrete and steel and other energy intensive materials.

Kathrine Hayhoe:

Sure. Well, first of all, those are both climate solutions and forest management solutions, both of them, so it's not an either or. We're often more familiar with deforestation in that that is what is happening, especially in tropical areas like the Amazon where unique, irreplaceable old growth forests are being clear cut for unsustainable agriculture. That has all kinds of impacts on the surrounding community, on that larger region, and eventually on the world. Slowing and eventually stopping deforestation, especially in these unique ecosystems is absolutely essential. But sustainable forest management is also a climate solution because as trees grow, they take up carbon from the atmosphere. Then if we cut down the trees and use them for products like sustainable wood buildings for example, that keeps that carbon in the tree, it doesn't release it back into the atmosphere, so it's a way to sequester carbon while providing valuable products that we can use for other purposes. But of course, you don't want to clear cut a forest to get those trees. What you want to do is you want to sustainably manage a forest where just a certain amount of trees are taken out and those trees are replaced with new trees that continue to grow and continue to take up carbon. That is how our forests can increase their ability to be carbon sinks. Hope that helps.

Dave Strauss:

Great. Thank you. Katherine. We have another caller. We've got Paris W. from California.

Paris W.:

Hello?

Dave Strauss:

Paris?

Yes, Paris, how are you?

Paris W.:

Hi. Wow. Okay. It's Paris, like the city in France, by the way. But I wanted to ask, since Nature Conservancy is kind of a leader among the nonprofits dedicated to the environment and advocating for nature and something that we all care about, among the various nonprofits, many of whom have their niches, is there any kind of symposium or gathering where all of the different nonprofits kind of come together and have conversations about best practices and determining within the work that you're doing, what exactly constitutes a best practice on the ground?

Kathrine Hayhoe:

That's a great question, and the answer is yes with an asterisk on it. Why that is is because we do so many different things. We work not only in every state, but in 80 other countries around the world. We do everything from innovative impact finance to forest management to climate resilience work. There are other organizations that are large, but we're the largest in the space, and we do so many different things that in order to have a meeting that covered every single different thing that we do, that that would just be so big with all the experts around the entire world that I don't think it would even be manageable.

Instead, each different aspect of what we do, especially given if there's considerable discussion about what best practices are, like best practices in Western forest management or best practices in calculating carbon storage and carbon credits, or best practices in citing renewable energy in locations that won't have biodiverse impacts on biodiversity, whatever topic it is that whatever part it is of TNC is looking at typically is involved in the community that includes the other nonprofits working in that space, but it also typically includes academic experts, people at universities who are experts in this area. It could include people from other countries working in government here or government in other countries who are also experts in that area. It's part of a larger national and sometimes even international community of practice. Our folks are always participating in these types of meetings or conferences or workshops or symposia.

Then there are certain different events that cover more topics. For example, the big climate meetings that you hear of that happen in November each year, the last one was in Egypt this past year. That's one where all the big nonprofits come together from around the whole world. Every country in the world comes together as well. All kinds of other organizations come together, including for-profit organizations and all kinds of other NGOs. That event is focused on climate change. There those of us who are specifically engaged in climate action, climate policy, nature-based solutions to climate change, that was an area where we all got together with other people in that field. Then in December there was the biodiversity meeting in Montreal. There, everybody who worked with biodiversity credits or biodiversity preservation or policy or management related to biodiversity, everybody went to that one. The answer to your question is yes, but like I said, with a little asterisk to it, because there's so many different areas that we do, we want to make sure that we are connecting with everybody else who specifically works in that area to make sure that we are informed by best practices and that we're also contributing our experience to those best practices.

Dave Strauss:

Great. Thank you. Katherine. We've got a lot of questions coming. We have another one from Tom A. from Washington, Tom? Tom, are you with us? Well, Katherine, since not sure where Tom is, I have a question for you.

Kathrine Hayhoe:

Okay.

Dave Strauss:

I know you've traveled all over and studied fascinating places on earth, which I'm very jealous of. I'm wondering if you can share thoughts on a place that inspired you or shaped your work.

Kathrine Hayhoe:

Sure. Just before the pandemic, I was working on a project with colleagues from the National Centers for Environmental Information and the State Department here in the United States and partners at several major universities in India on providing climate data and climate information to state planners to help build resilience to more intense and more dangerous heat waves, stronger downpours and floods, more intense droughts. I had the opportunity to work directly with colleagues and scientists in India and do essentially a road show where we traveled to different parts of India and then held workshops where state planners would come to these workshops and learn about the resources that we had and that they were collecting to help them understand how climate was changing where they lived and how they could plan for the future.

It was really incredible because I was there to learn from them and they were there to learn from me because we don't have a lot of data for some of these communities. I was trying to work with them to see what data they had that I could collect, and they were working with me to see what climate projections I had that they could then apply to their own communities. As you know, India has been hit by incredible heat waves, massive floods, so many extremes that are directly affecting people's lives and livelihoods and working with people who are just at the very front lines, doing their very best to plan for the future to ensure that people are safe, that their homes are safe, that there's enough water, that there's enough food, you can see the immediate impact of the work you're doing. I think that we can see that in many of the communities that we work in, even here in the United States.

For example, in many of our big cities, when a heat wave comes, it can be up to 15 degrees hotter in a lower income neighborhood in the same city than in a higher income neighborhood because of the lack of green space and tree cover.

When I think of my own experience, the project I was working on just before the pandemic, and then I think of a project like the Green Heart Project that we have in Louisville, Kentucky that is going into low income neighborhoods and working with people in the local community because it's their community to figure out, do you want green spaces, and if so, where do you want to put those green spaces? And then working to make sure they're protecting people from heat and flood and filtering the air as well, protecting them from air pollution. You can see right there that we're making a real difference in people's lives too. That's what inspires me is when we can see that we're making a difference right now here today for real places and real people, but we are also investing long term in solving the biodiversity and the climate crisis. Those, for me, are the win-wins.

Dave Strauss:

Yeah, totally agree. Thank you. We have another caller. We've got Crayal S. from Minnesota. Crayal?

Crayal S.:

Yes. Can you hear me?

Dave Strauss:

Oh yeah, absolutely. Go ahead and ask your question.

Crayal S.:

Yeah, thanks for taking my call. I'm a Lutheran pastor here in Minnesota and we're hoping to pass a resolution here in a couple months encouraging congregations and individuals to do more with care for creation but we have been getting a bit of feedback of opposition to this resolution because of concerns of others of how it's going to impact the economic well-being of communities and people by promoting this in the churches. I wanted to get your insight on how to bring up the issue of care for creation in a way that really doesn't divide the community, but can actually unite it and bring it together.

Kathrine Hayhoe:

Mm-hmm. Well, you're definitely asking the right person there because that is exactly the approach that I take in my personal life. A few of you might know my story that I originally started off in astrophysics and I was planning to be an astronomer. But growing up as a Christian, I truly believe that we're to love our neighbor as ourselves, but I didn't really understand that climate change was a human issue. I thought of climate change as an environmental issue that environmentalists care about and environmentalists work on, and the rest of us support their work and wish them well. But I was almost finished my undergraduate degree in astronomy and physics, and I was planning to head to graduate school when I needed an extra class to finish my degree. I looked around and there was a brand new class on climate change. I thought, "Well, that looks interesting, why not take it?"

I was completely shocked there to learn that climate change is certainly an environmental issue, but it's also a health issue. It's a food and a water issue. It's a poverty and a justice issue. In fact, it's a human issue affecting all of us, all living things on this planet, human and non-human, but disproportionately affecting the poorest and most vulnerable people the most. That spoke directly to me as a Christian, and I know that it speaks directly to many other people of other faiths too, because having responsibility for what many of you as creation and caring for those less fortunate than us, those are core tenants of every major world religion. That's what made me myself become a climate scientist, is being motivated by my faith, and then much to my surprise, I'm Canadian, much to my surprise, moving to the US, I discovered that many people did not share my perspective on that. In fact, their views on climate change were much more informed by their politics than they were by their faith. Just to sort of give you that background on where I'm coming from and responding to this question, this is something that I feel very deeply about because I'm part of this community myself.

When we dig into why is it that in the United States, Christians would be opposed to caring for what we view as God's creation and to caring for the poorest, most vulnerable people who are most affected by it, we see that it does not have a basis in theology. It has a basis in ideology, in politics. People say, "Well, what about poor people who depend on fossil fuels?" Well, the reason they depend on fossil fuels is because we live in an economy where fossil fuels are subsidized to the tune of $16 million US per minute around the world and the fossil fuel companies are making the largest profits they have ever made while burning fossil fuels creates the air pollution that's responsible for 10 million premature deaths per year around the world. There is no question that this transition is the right thing to do for people who are already suffering the impacts of our dependence and fossil fuels.

Now, there are communities, I'm not sure that there's so many of them in Minnesota, but there are definitely larger communities, say in Kentucky or Ohio or West Virginia and here where I live in Texas, where the communities depend on oil and gas to put food on the table for their families. That's why the concept of a just transition is so important. I would encourage you to look at what the Presbyterian Church in Ireland did, I think it was last year or the year before, where they announced a stance on climate change and a stance on engaging with and supporting communities who have traditionally depended on fossil fuels to supply their local economy and to give them jobs and engaging in what's called the just transition, to really lean into these people's lives, support them in this transition, which is already happening in many places, and ensure that they too are able to reach for that better future through attracting new jobs to the community or just being aware of the fact that this is happening, advocating for those communities. It truly is, I believe, part of what all of us can do. It's part of what we do at TNC too, looking at citing renewable energy in places that have traditionally relied on fossil fuels, so it brings new jobs to that community.

Add that concept of the just transition into what you're talking about, but in terms of the theological basis for what you're doing, there are so many good resources out there. I have many myself. There's great resources out there from all kinds of faith-based organizations to really put together that theological case for why caring about people and caring about the planet is the Christian thing to do.

Dave Strauss:

Thank you, Katherine and Crayal. I hope that was helpful. There are some really good questions this evening and many more to come. I just request that if you have a question, please press zero to get into the queue. Katherine is more than happy to answer. Our next caller is James H. from Montana. James? James, are you with us?

James H.:

Yes. James Humphrey from Montana, from Great Falls.

Dave Strauss:

Yeah, welcome.

James H.:

Thank you. I've worked extensively with commercial sized farms and to a lesser extent, ranches across Montana for the last 30 years. I'm very interested in what measures you find to be most productive in terms of reducing climate change that commercial agriculture can adopt.

Kathrine Hayhoe:

That is a great question, and I love the fact that farmers and ranchers can be climate heroes because one of the biggest ways that we can make that drain bigger, earlier I was talking about the swimming pool with the hose and the drain, one of the biggest ways we can make that drain bigger is through climate smart, sustainable agriculture, regenerative agriculture, because it turns out that we have too much carbon in the atmosphere, but we would like to have more carbon in our soil because carbon is an incredible fertilizer. How do we get more carbon in our soil through smart land and crop management?

At The Nature Conservancy, we study how managed grazing of cattle can help to put carbon back in soil. We study how regenerative agricultural practices from cover crops to no-till agriculture to biochar can help put carbon back in the soil. Not only do these practices help with heat trapping gases, but they also help to maintain water and nutrients in the soil, they help to grow crops, they help to maintain healthy food scapes as well as healthy ecosystems and healthy landscapes. They really are win-win-wins.

Often what's standing in people's way is simply the fact that we haven't done that before. Are you really sure it's going to work? Maybe it works over there, but how do we know it works over here? Your work is so important because encouraging early adopters is the number one thing that can catalyze change in that area because when somebody sees their neighbor, somebody down the road doing something and it's actually working for them, that encourages them to try it too. That's a lot of what we do working, especially in the Great Plains in the Midwest states, is working with farmers, with landowners, with land managers, with producers and producing organizations to communicate best practices. Our scientists study those best practices to make sure that they really are accomplishing what we hope they will, that again, have benefits right now today, but also have benefits for the planet and for people tomorrow.

Dave Strauss:

Thanks, Katherine. We have time for one more caller and then we'll wrap it up and get your final thoughts or your last thoughts. We have Martha C. from North Carolina. Martha?

Martha C.:

Oh, yes, hello.

Dave Strauss:

Hi, Martha.

Martha C.:

Hi. Well, I'm in my mid-eighties and I haven't much time left, but I want to be useful the rest is my time, and I've been encouraged from my family, my parents, my grandparents, to take care and take care of our earth. I want to be able to pass something onto my grandchildren but in the meantime, in immediate, what can I do in the time that I have?

Kathrine Hayhoe:

I love that. I wish all of us could say what you just said, because that truly is a perspective of love and care for the generations that come who inherit this planet from us.

The biggest thing that we can do, and this is a great place to end, the biggest thing that we can do is something that you are already doing, that each of us has the ability to do. No matter what our age, no matter where we are, we have a voice, we have a voice to share why these issues matter to us where we live. Again, focusing on what we see happening, where we live, and how it affects the people we love, the places we love, and the things we love, and what real solutions look like in the places where we live as well, the benefits that they have for people, the benefits they have for the local environment, the benefits they have for future generations, how excited you are by what was happening, what you wish we could be doing more of because you know of the benefits that it has. You have that voice and I know that you're already using it, and each of us can do that. That truly, again, is how we change the place where we live. It's how we change ultimately the world.

Thank you for what you do, and thank you, everyone, for joining this call. Thank you for your amazing questions. I hope I've provided a couple of resources that you can find out more about and I know on each of these calls, you'll be hearing more about these amazing solutions, but as you join these calls or as you get a TNC newsletter or as you hear what we're working on, don't forget that the catalyst for change is to have these conversations and share this information, so whenever you learn something new, have a conversation with people about it and say, "Did you know," and share a piece of good news or a solution that you learned about. Spread that news and make it contagious. Thank you.

Dave Strauss:

Thank you, Katherine, and thank you to everyone who joined this evening for the live call. I can't thank you enough for all your support towards The Nature Conservancy and our cause but we'll be following up with you with a survey by email, so if you're not on the email list, go to nature.org and sign up.

Katherine, thank you so much. I know your time is valuable. We just really appreciate the opportunity to spend this evening with you. I know our members and supporters really enjoyed this conversation tonight, so thank you. Unfortunately, we couldn't, oh, go ahead. Sorry, Katherine.

Kathrine Hayhoe:

Oh, sorry, Dave. I was just going to thank you and I was going to say I for, I totally forgot one thing, one really important thing I wanted to share, which is-

Dave Strauss:

Oh, of course, sure.

Kathrine Hayhoe:

We just, and when I say just, I mean just like in January, we just started a monthly science newsletter for The Nature Conservancy where we highlight the amazing science that we are doing around the world and how that is making a difference to people on the planet. That is available to anyone who wants to sign up. I'll give a link to Dave so he can send it out afterwards. But you are welcome to sign up for that and every month you will get stories of what we're doing around the world, and that, again, is something to talk about. Thank you.

Dave Strauss:

Fantastic. Thank you, Katherine. I appreciate it. Unfortunately, we couldn't get to everybody's questions, but if you have any additional comments, please, please press one to leave a voicemail for us, and we will surely get back to you. Thank you again for your time, and have a wonderful evening. Good night.

Dave Strauss:

Good evening, and welcome to tonight's live Q&A with David Banks, the Nature Conservancy's chief conservation officer. I'm Dave Strauss, director of membership at the Nature Conservancy, and I'll be your moderator this evening. I'm looking forward to hearing your questions. This is a live event with lots of opportunities for you to ask questions and share your thoughts. If you have a question for tonight's speaker, please press zero on your telephone keypad either now or at any point during the event. Your questions will help guide tonight's discussion, so please ask away.

Dave Strauss:

If you're just joining us, welcome to tonight's live Q&A with the Nature Conservancy's Conservation Leadership. We're thrilled to have our chief conservation officer, David Banks, with us tonight. He is here to talk about our urgent conservation priorities and answer your questions. If you'd like to ask a question, press zero at any time to enter the queue. Thanks again to everyone for joining us for this live discussion. Your support means so much, and I'm really glad you that you've taken the opportunity to connect with us this evening. Our thoughts are with those of you have been affected by Hurricane Ian, and I hope you and your loved ones are all safe and well this evening. Thank you again for joining the call. We're glad you are able to participate.

Dave Strauss:

Our featured guest, David Banks, has a distinguished career in conservation. We are honored to have him here to talk with you, answer your questions, and share his perspective on how we will continue working to safeguard the lands and waters that sustain us all. David is the chief conservation officer and has been with the Nature Conservancy for more than 27 years, leading conservation work in TNC priority areas around the world. He previously served as the executive vice president for Africa, Europe, and India, and led TNC's Africa region for more than a decade. Further, he managed the Alaska program and served as their conservation director and conservation planner. David is proud to have started his career serving as a Peace Corps volunteer in Ghana. In his free time, he enjoys rafting wilderness rivers in western North America and skiing the back country of Montana.

Dave Strauss:

Welcome, David. I know our supporters on the phone will have great questions for you this evening. Again, if you'd like to ask a question during tonight's telephone town hall event or if you have any comments for our speaker, please press zero at any time to get in the queue to ask your question. There are several hundred people on the line, so we won't be able to get to everybody, but we will try to take as many callers as possible. We'll also have a couple chances for you to share your thoughts with a few interactive polling questions as we go along. Let me hand it over to you, David, to welcome those who have just joined us and share a few of your thoughts before we open up the lines for questions. David?

David Banks:

Thanks, Dave. Hello, everyone. I'm excited to be here with fellow members. I'm also a member of the Nature Conservancy and a member of our Legacy Club as well. It's really good to be in this call because I spend my days and sometimes evenings working on conservation, focus on the science, and trying to get things done for our planet. It helps me to be able to hear from all of you and what you're excited about, what you're concerned about, what you're curious about because it helps guide our work. Our teams are working very hard right now. This is a important time for our mission of conserving the lands and waters that we all depend on.

David Banks:

We have a number of challenges that we face right now. I don't think it's news to all of you that the issues of climate change, the climate crisis, and the biodiversity crisis is not only impacting nature, the plants and animals around the world at an unprecedented scale, but it's also impacting all of us. Hurricane Ian is a good example of the kind of events that we're facing these days. But we also see this in the science and the reports. I'm sure many of you have seen the latest UN climate report. The findings from that present a pretty daunting world that we need to face up to as humans and fight hard to make a difference to address those threats to climate and to nature on this planet.

David Banks:

I'm actually quite hopeful despite the news that's out there on a daily basis, and I'm convinced that we can step up to make a difference for the planet and for the people that live here. It's going to take us all leaning in together using good science, being innovative, and working on a scale that is unprecedented in our history, but we can do that. TNC has always been grounded in science. Science is the fundamental way that we decide what to do and where we decide to work. It is possible that we can meet the ambitious climate targets that we've set and at the same time protect 30% of the lands and waters on Earth by 2030. This is something scientists believe we need to do to conserve the lands and waters that we depend on. We have to act now in order to do that, and we have to act at a bigger scale than we have in the past. I feel like we're ready for that.

David Banks:

The Nature Conservancy is poised to make a contribution because our teams have the unique combination of skills, the experience on the ground, the relationships that come from that, the resources to make a difference, and the support from people like all of you that believe we must do more to change the trajectory of our planet. The world needs the best of us, all of us, you, me, our leaders, people that we meet every day working together to be successful to address the challenges that we face right now. That's why TNC has looked at how we can make our best contributions to dramatically reduce the rate of species loss and drastically cut carbon emissions. Our roots as an organization in land acquisition simply isn't enough to make a difference. TNC has to be focused on strategies and policy efforts that are at a bigger scale. We simply can't buy enough land to make a difference.

David Banks:

Our team has led an effort to bring together Nature Conservancy staff and volunteer leaders from around the world to identify a few key areas where we can make the biggest difference in the next seven years by 2030. Some of these are things like using the power of nature to tackle climate change: protecting forests, grasslands, mangroves. These are the natural things that sequester carbon, that store carbon. We don't have to create machines. Nature has provided that. It's the roots, the leaves, the stems, the things that sequester carbon. If we can protect more forests, restore more forests and grasslands and mangroves, we can make a huge difference for us, our children, and our grandchildren that depend on a stable climate.

David Banks:

Our goal is to remove about three billion metric tons of carbon emissions per year. That's about the same as removing 650 million cars from the road. We're also ramping up our legacy of land conservation. We aim to conserve 650 million hectares of healthy lands around the globe. This is an area twice the size of Indiana where I started with Nature Conservancy as an intern. A thriving and vibrant future for all of us and those species that we care deeply about is possible if all of us and the local communities that we work with shape decisions about the lands and waters we all care about so deeply. We're also increasing our work on community-based conservation efforts, supporting 45 million people around the world, indigenous communities, local communities who depend on healthy lands and waters and oceans for their livelihoods and wellbeing. It's bold, it's ambitious, and, more importantly, it's achievable, but we must act now.

David Banks:

This is what we face. I'd love to open it up to questions. I'll probably turn it over to Dave. Thank you everyone for being here, and I look forward to hearing what you have to say. Dave?

Dave Strauss:

Thank you, David. I really appreciate your opening remarks. What stood out was act now and act at a bigger scale, so I think that's really where TNC sits squarely right in the middle of all of this. I want to welcome to anyone who just joined us. It's a privilege to have David Banks, the Nature Conservancy's chief conservation officer, with us tonight for this live Q&A discussion on conservation priorities. As a reminder, to ask a question, please press zero on your telephone keypad at any time. While we wait to get our first caller, I wanted to thank you again to everybody participating in this virtual town hall event tonight. On behalf of all of our staff and scientists, I wanted to thank you for your loyalty and generosity. Your support means so much. We are united in our mission to protect the lands and waters on which all life depends, but each of us is inspired to act for different reasons.

Dave Strauss:

I want to ask a quick poll question to get a sense of why you've chosen to be a Nature Conservancy supporter. To respond, press the corresponding number on your telephone keypad. So the question, why do you choose to help protect nature? Press one if you're concerned about the climate emergency. Press two if you care about saving endangered species. Press three if you want to preserve beautiful, natural places. Press four if you want to keep the air we breathe and water we drink clean. Press five for all of the above. Press six for other. Again, I repeat, why do you choose to help protect nature? Press one if you're concerned about the climate emergency. Press two if you care about saving endangered species. Press three if you want to preserve beautiful, natural places. Press four if you want to keep the air we breathe and water we drink clean. Press five for all of the above, and press six for other. Your answers will help guide our discussions, and we'll have the results for you in just a bit. Again, be sure to press zero if you'd like to ask a question live tonight.

Dave Strauss:

Tonight's event is meant to be a dialogue about issues that are important to you, so we sent an email earlier this week, an email survey asking participants what question they wanted most for David to answer this evening. The majority of the supporters said this question was top of mind for them. So David, the question is, what's the most critical solution to address climate change?

David Banks:

Thanks, Dave, and thanks, everyone. The most critical solution is to rapidly convert to a low-carbon future. This is primarily through investment in renewables, like solar and wind, as a way to move away from fossil fuels that are driving the climate crisis. That's the big one. But let me add one other that's critical to us and we're investing a great deal of our money is in what we call the natural climate solutions. I mentioned this earlier. It's about both protecting nature, forest, grasslands, mangroves, as well as restoring forests and grasslands because nature can absorb a huge amount of carbon that is emitted into the air. So while we're converting to a low-carbon future that's based on renewables, we need to absorb more carbon by protecting nature, and we get these ancillary benefits of protecting biodiversity through that strategy. Dave?

Dave Strauss:

Great. Thank you. We have our first caller on the line. As a reminder, you can press zero at any time on your telephone keypad to ask a question live tonight. We'll try to get as many as possible, so listen for your name once you get in the queue. We have Daniel from New York. Daniel, welcome.

Daniel:

Hello. I was wondering what the Nature Conservancy will be doing as far as agriculture and the climate change by the year 2030.

David Banks:

Great, thanks. We do have a program that's dedicated to providing food and water sustainably that's heavily focused on agriculture. Our focus with that program is primarily in two areas. One is helping farmers convert from agriculture that has huge fertilizer and pesticide inputs to what we refer to as regenerative agriculture, which is more organics, buffer strips, no-till farming. By helping farmers, by educating and providing support for this, we can help move farmers to a more regenerative way to produce food. In the long run, they can get a better income, and it has less of an impact on biodiversity, and it improves soil health which sequesters carbon in the soil. So this is a really important effort on the agriculture side.

David Banks:

The second piece of this is what we call zero conversion commodities where we're working with large industrial farmers to make sure that they don't impact high-quality forests or other areas of important biodiversity so they can protect that and try and push to more regenerative agriculture in places where they can produce more food. So it's much more of a mapping and planning exercise to avoid the places where there'd be very high impact.

Dave Strauss:

That's great.

David Banks:

Dave, I'll just point out one other thing. We're working now in India, which is a newer program for us, where we're working with farmers in the Punjab region to reduce crop residue burning. This represents about 30% of the pollution in Delhi. It's also a terrible way to produce food in that region. So helping them with new technology and equipment that can reduce the crop residue burning which improves the air quality in Delhi and also improves the food production and the habitat in the Punjab region. That's just a good example of where we're doing this.

Dave Strauss:

Thank you, David. That's a great example. Thank you, Daniel, for your question. I want to quickly share the results of our first poll before getting to our next live caller. I'm happy to see that 73% of you said that you choose to support the Nature conservancy because you're concerned about the climate emergency. I've been doing this for a few years now and that percent continually increases, which just shows the urgency around climate. Let's take another question from the phone. As a reminder, you can press zero at any time on your telephone keypad to ask a question live tonight. We have Amparo from California. Amparo, did I say your name correctly?

Amparo:

Yes, you did.

Dave Strauss:

Fantastic. Yes, absolutely. Feel free to ask your question.

Amparo:

Hi. I'm Amparo, and I'm from Fontana. We are in a part of California that is overrun with a big warehouses that's causing a lot of havoc in our area. I wanted some recommendations on what we can do to have better community resilience to the climate change since we really do sit in a valley that's suffering from a lot of inversions. Thank you in advance.

David Banks:

Great. Thanks, Amparo. This is something many of our urban areas are seeing. I started talking about the strategies we use to tackle climate change. Many of these strategies also help us address the pollution issues and inversions that are there as well. I talked about strategies around forest protection and converting to a low-carbon future. But the most important thing we all can do to make a difference in this is to help elect politicians that understand the climate crisis and are willing to make the hard choices to move to a low-carbon future that includes renewables and the protection of forests and grassland. Amparo, I think a key thing is with this election year coming up, I'm not telling you who you should vote for, but really work hard to understand how candidates feel about climate change and help elect those candidates that will make a difference on the climate crisis because we need government to step up to address the pollution issues and the climate issues on a bigger scale.

Dave Strauss:

Great. Thank you, David, and thank you, Amparo, for the question. Let's take another caller. We have Liz from the Midwest, from Wisconsin. Liz, are you with us?

Liz:

Yes. I had another question that I put into the system. I just wanted to know how involved is Nature Conservancy in the Endangered Species Act and helping animals such as wolves thrive instead of being hunted down. I think of Yellowstone and when they reintroduced wolves in the parks, the entire ecosystem had changed for the better because the herbivores were no longer taking over the parklands. It's a real problem here in Wisconsin that the hunters are just chomping at the bit to hunt wolves. I just don't understand it. They just seem to think of wolves as the worst animal on the face of the Earth. I think we need to have a new appreciation and maybe a whole new system of communication to communicate the benefits of wolves and other top-tier carnivores and their role in the ecosystems. I wonder where you stand on that.

David Banks:

Thanks, Liz. It's a great question, and I appreciate your knowledge of the Yellowstone system. I'm lucky enough to live in Montana right now, so I have the pleasure of being able to get to Yellowstone and Glacier and see wolves. Our teams in places where we do have wolves are very active in helping conserve them and also helping the local communities deal with the real pressure of wolves, and other carnivores for that matter, where there can be conflict between the animals and people's livelihoods. I'm happy to say that where we've engaged with ranchers and with farmers that are often threatened by wolves and historically would've killed them, wolves and bears for that matter, we've been able to work with many of these ranchers and farmers to help them understand other ways of avoiding the impact of wolves.

David Banks:

One of the techniques we've used in Montana is called a range rider program where there are some wolves and bears that are collared and we can track their movement within the system, and the range riders communicate with the ranchers so that cattle can be moved away from where wolves are. Then through that you develop this system where the cattle are kept away from the wolves, and wolves are kept away from the cattle. Wolves tend to focus more on elk which are an easier target in those situations, and it's kept the natural system in place.

David Banks:

Interestingly, it's also changed the mentality of the ranchers. I know from several of the ranches we're working with in Montana, you had ranchers that would actively have killed wolves in the beginning. But over time of working with Nature Conservancy staff and educating and working on these alternative ways to address gradation, they've changed their mind completely now to where they really value the presence of wolves and bears because to them it represents the wildness that Montana's all about. I know Wisconsin's facing some of these things as wolves move in. I'm not sure exactly what the Wisconsin program is doing, but I think there could be some similar opportunities there.

Dave Strauss:

Great. Thank you, David. Appreciate that. As a reminder, you can press zero at any time on your telephone keypad to ask a question live tonight. David, we have another caller. We have June from Illinois. June, are you with us?

June:

Hello? Yes, yes.

Dave Strauss:

Hi, June?

June:

Hi, hi, hi. Thank you. I'm very interested, and I didn't catch too much of what you said about policy, but you said that the Nature Conservancy is going beyond land acquisition. That won't solve all the problems. What about policy? Are you talking about governmental policy? How is the Conservancy trying to promote a change in policies that will affect the environment and help with climate change?

David Banks:

Great. Thanks, June. It's good to hear from you. I mentioned policy because many of the challenges we're facing today are so big that we need government to step up and help us with this in the United States and also outside the US where we're working. We have a growing team that is helping government to draft policy that benefits biodiversity and helps us address climate change. We also provide good science to guide government to come up with solutions to address climate change and protect biodiversity. A good example of this is the recent Inflation Reduction Act that just passed Congress. It's something we worked very hard on and are happy that it passed because it has a significant amount of funding to help advance renewable energy and also to protect nature in a way that sequesters carbon. That single act helps us address 22% of our climate mitigation goals, these goals we've set for 2030. It would take us so much more to do that through individual actions. That's why that policy engagement becomes so important.

Dave Strauss:

I would absolutely agree with you, David. Our next poll question is around policy. Policy is such an important part of how we make meaningful change on today's challenges such as the Inflation Reduction Act. Many of our members are actively speaking out more in conservation policy through our online action center. I'm curious how many people have signed one of our pledges, so I wanted to take a minute to do a quick poll. Press one if you've signed a policy action in our online action center this year, press two if you have not visited our online action center, or press three if you do not recall but would be interested in learning more about the action center. Again, press one if you've signed a policy action in our online action center this year, press two if you have not visited our online action center, or press three if you don't recall but would be interested in learning more about the action center. Thank you. Let's go to our next question from the phone. We have Sarah from Virginia. Sarah?

Sarah:

Good evening. Thank you for taking my question. I'm wondering how can or does collaboration with other environmental organizations help with the work of the Nature Conservancy? I am interested in how the organization collaborates with other groups.

David Banks:

That's a great question. It's something that's been really important to me and our team over the years. As Dave mentioned, I've been around here for 28 years, and I've seen the organization evolve. It's always been a hallmark of the Nature Conservancy that we collaborate and help support other organizations and work together. Many of you know the local land trusts in the communities where you live. That's an area where we help get the land trusts movement started, and we still collaborate very actively with land trusts. In my hometown, we donate to land trusts. We help them in managing land. We work together on bond initiatives. This is true in many of the states where we work. The land trusts and the Nature Conservancy work closely together.

David Banks:

Then the latest one that I'm very excited about is a big collaboration with World Wildlife Fund globally as well as the Pew Foundation on how we can protect 30% of the planet through a program called Enduring Earth, which is all about working with governments to protect new national parks or protected areas, have governments commit money, the Nature Conservancy commit money, World Wildlife Fund commit money, and Pew Foundation commit money. So we're all working together as one team to get a common outcome in these important countries. That's unprecedented in the scale of collaboration. It has the potential to change the face of protected areas around the globe.

Dave Strauss:

Great. Thank you, David. I wanted to quickly get the results from our second poll question. 12% of you said you have taken one of our policy actions. The pledges and letters to Congress that are in our online action center are a chance for supporters to add their voices to critical conservation policy issues. It's an easy way for you to speak up for nature. Be sure to visit nature.org/act to see the urgent issues that need your voice right now. Let's take another question from the phone. We have Susie from Salt Lake City, Utah. Susie?

Susie:

Hello.

Dave Strauss:

Oh, welcome. Feel free to ask your question.

Susie:

Thank you. I'm wondering if it would be helpful since there has been an increase in forest fires in the West, and, of course, our forests are a very important part of reducing carbon, would it be helpful to increase the tree cover in urban areas such as people's homes? Add more trees to your front yard or your backyard. Do we really need so much lawn?

David Banks:

Great question, Susie. Absolutely. I think every tree matters for sure. These trees in urban environments make a huge difference for... You may have heard of the urban heat islands. That's a new term that I learned about in the last few years. Because of all the asphalt and buildings, our cities are getting much hotter than they have in the past. So when we plant trees in our backyards, on the streets, it helps provide the shade and reduces that urban heat effect. Those trees also sequester carbon. So the more that we can do of tree planting in our own yard, our own communities, it can make a huge difference for the planet. We have a program at the Nature Conservancy called Plant a Billion Trees, and you can probably find it on our website, which helps provide some guidance on this and what you can do to make a difference.

David Banks:

Susie, while you're on, I know you're from Salt Lake City, because I think the other big issue that you face is the water crisis for the Great Salt Lake. This is another thing that's impacting us through climate change. The Nature Conservancy in Utah is working very closely with the state of Utah to try and improve water flow into the Great Salt Lake and make a difference because it's so important to the future of that state. The reduced water flow into the lake and the drying of the lake also contributes to air pollution that we talked a lot about earlier. So a really important connection between nature and people there in your great city.

Dave Strauss:

Great. Thank you, Susie, for the question and David for the answer. Let's take another question from the phone. We have Stephanie from Portland, Oregon. Stephanie?

Stephanie:

Yes, I'm here.

Dave Strauss:

Great.

Stephanie:

Can you hear me?

Dave Strauss:

Absolutely. Feel free to ask your question.

Stephanie:

My question is the following. I'm just an individual. I try to vote correctly. I support the Nature Conservancy and other organizations as I can. What I'm worried about, what I think I can do, and I want to see if you think this is of value. At the local level, I'm hoping to become head of our neighborhood association. After reading the comments of George Monbiot and Peter Kalmus and Peter Dykstra where they say nobody talks about the climate. Everybody goes about their daily business. I'm thinking that as chair of the neighborhood association, I can have us start talking about the climate and talk to the city officials, talk amongst ourselves, take little steps that we can do that don't really mean a whole lot but are educational, like different kinds of food waste or not driving with the kayak holder on the top of the car and so on. Do you think this can be a value of getting people to not be afraid to talk about the climate collapse?

David Banks:

Thanks, Stephanie. It's a great question and a great point. We've come a long way on this issue. There was a time when people didn't feel like they could talk about the climate crisis, and now it's becoming more mainstream. Your point is exactly what I hear when I'm out there in the field is people are still not talking about it as much as they should be talking about it, as much as they need to. So everything that you can do with your neighborhood association, with your friends, with your community to talk about why it's important and how our individual actions, both the choices we make at home and with transportation and the food we eat as well as who we vote for, makes a difference for the planet.

David Banks:

We have a chief scientist, her name's Katharine Hayhoe. You can google her. She has the highest number of Twitter followers of any scientist in the world. So she's very influential, and she has a lot of good guidance on how you can talk about climate change with people that wouldn't normally understand it. She also did a show on Jimmy Kimmel Live. I'm not promoting Jimmy Kimmel in any way. You can Google that and find that episode where she talks about how you can have a conversation about climate change with your neighbor. It's really helpful to use language that can convince our friends and neighbors that this is very important to our future. Thanks so much for that question and good luck with it.

Dave Strauss:

Thank you for your question. They're all really great questions. I'm just looking at the queue, and there's many more folks that have questions. Just thank you for your patience. Again, if you do have a question, press zero to get into the queue. Before we go to our next caller, I wanted to go back to the responses to our first poll question because many of you said you choose to protect nature because you care about endangered species. David, I know you've spent many years leading TNC's Alaska program and all of our work in Africa, both places where there are so many threats to wildlife. I'm wondering if you can share some thoughts about the best ways to protect threatened species.

David Banks:

Thanks, Dave. I have to admit that I'm somewhat obsessed with the species conservation part. I've always enjoyed seeing wildlife in their natural setting especially when I had the chance to work in Africa and Alaska, just given the scale that you can see them in. When I think about this, by far the most important thing we can do as an organization and you can help us with is protecting their homeland, their habitat. For many of these species, particularly those that are endangered, their land or water that they depend on has shrunk so much because of human development and human pressure, either from agriculture or industrial or residential development.

David Banks:

What we need to do now is rapidly protect what is still left that these animals and fish depend on, and then restore those areas that connect the big places so that animals can move between places once again. So we've set a goal of protecting 30% of the planet by 2030. That's both on land and in oceans. We think this is the least we can do in order to provide good habitat for these important species. All of you could help us with that, both by advocating and supporting our work on big species conservation.

Dave Strauss:

Couldn't agree with you more, David. Thank you. Let's take another question from the phone. We have Nina from Sacramento. Nina?

Nina:

Hello. I had a question about exactly this, what you were just talking about because is protecting 30% of the rivers and streams and the lands sufficient really to protect the species that are declining so quickly. My concerns are really the impacts of climate change that we're seeing across the globe, either floods that are destroying rivers and streams or drying that's also destroying those habitats, let alone the social impacts that are occurring, invasive species, and just the rapid loss that we see in aquatic species throughout the world. That's really the crux of my question. Is 30% enough?

David Banks:

It's a great question. My quick answer is no, it's not enough. Our goal is the 30% by 2030. We think that's a feasible goal. If the global community steps up, we collaborate with partners, that we can protect 30% of the oceans, the lands, and freshwater systems. It's a start there. There's a famous scientist, E.O. Wilson from Harvard, that worked with us. He's written a number of papers indicating that we actually need to protect 50% of the Earth to conserve the important species that we care about. There's quite a bit of debate about that in the science community, but clearly it needs to be more than 30%.

David Banks:

At the same time we can protect land, but we also need to work on the other threats to land and water that you can't really address through protection. It's hard to put a fence around a river and deal with things. So we have to work on, as a previous caller mentioned, agriculture. We need to work on pollution emissions. We need to work on land use planning and make sure that the laws are in place and that we educate landowners and farmers and ranchers on better techniques so that we don't have to protect everything, and we can still address the impacts to the things we care about. But it needs to be a multifaceted approach.

Dave Strauss:

Great. Thank you. Nina and David, your question and answers really lead in well to our next poll question. That connection to the places and species in your community is so important. So much of our work at TNC is done in partnership with communities and private landowners, and we're also lucky to have many Nature Conservancy protected areas across the country that are open to the public. I want do a quick poll. Have you ever visited a Nature Conservancy preserve? Press one for yes. Press two for no. Press three for not sure. Again, have you ever visited a Nature Conservancy preserve? Press one for yes. Press two for no. Press three for not sure. Now, David, if you're ready, we're going to go to our next caller. It is Penny from North Carolina. Penny?

Penny:

Hi.

Dave Strauss:

Hi, Penny.

Penny:

I was a little confused by needing to record before now being with you, but thank you for taking my call. I'm particularly concerned about the joint impact of the fires and the droughts and the decreasing level of waters, particularly in the West, and what it's going to take and what the Nature Conservancy is going to do to help get more active willingness among the Western states to making serious changes in their water usage. I can't any longer separate the climate issues from the water crisis. I'd like to know more about what Nature Conservancy plans to do in addressing the water crisis.

David Banks:

Thanks, Penny. You are absolutely right. There really isn't a separation between the climate crisis and the water crisis. They're so directly linked. As you point out, we're seeing this in such big ways. The Colorado River is probably the most obvious or visible example of the water crisis in the West where the Glen Canyon Dam is almost at a point, within several feet, of not even being able to produce electricity anymore. We have cities like Las Vegas and Phoenix that depend on water from the Colorado River, and there are numerous other examples I could use around the West like this.

David Banks:

These are big, complex problems that the Nature Conservancy is tackling. We have a Colorado River team that is working very closely with governments in the Colorado River Basin, with farmers and ranchers and really important now with the tribes in that area that are also trying to influence sustainable water use. I think what we're seeing is that the cities, the state governments recognize now more than ever that they're in a crisis and this is going to require very hard choices, and they need good science to help them make those choices. So we're providing the science, the guidance, and the suggestions on that, and we need them to act right now. So it's a combination of influencing that action and providing the information to make the good decisions.

Dave Strauss:

Great. Thank you, David. Let's take a brief minute to get the results from the poll. 49% of you have visited a Nature Conservancy preserve. I can say if you have not, which makes 51% have not visited a preserve, I would highly recommend it. I had the opportunity a couple years ago to travel the country and visit multiple preserves throughout the country. Each one is so unique and fascinating to learn about how the Nature Conservancy is protecting land. Even had the opportunity to head over to Missoula almost in David's backyard and hang out with David for a moment or two. So that was great. You can learn more about our preserves at nature.org. Let's take another question from the phone. We have Judith from Virginia. Judith?

Judith:

Oh, good evening. Well, my question was almost a two-parter, so that wasn't fair. I'm not sure how to... I know what you're doing now. I've gotten a pretty good idea from these other excellent questions. I guess my question is very simple. What percentage of time and money do you spend on the United States as opposed to other countries now, or is that even relevant? Do you not have the figures? If you don't, then it isn't very relevant. I was very surprised, however, to find out about six years ago that that's what you also did. You went outside this country, which in many ways is going to benefit everybody, of course.

David Banks:

That's a very good question. Having worked for a lot of my career in the United States and also having run our Africa program, it was a number I paid attention to a lot. We've been working hard to increase the percentage that we invest outside the United States. We now work in 72 countries around the globe, and many of our biggest projects now are outside the United States with a rapidly growing program in Africa and Asia, India, I mentioned earlier, and we have a program in Europe that works on policy reform. So a lot of really exciting investments outside United States.

David Banks:

At this point, roughly 70% of our annual budget is invested in the United States, and then the rest of that is outside the United States. There's probably a little bit of fuzzy overlap there because, interestingly, many of our state programs are also helping our non-US programs as well. You've got really great experts in places like Illinois or Oregon that are providing expertise to our programs in Africa or Mongolia. So we like to talk about this as the one conservancy spirit. It doesn't matter where you're based, you can help make a difference on those most important issues for our mission.

Dave Strauss:

Great. Thank you, David. You ready for another question? We've got Doris from North Carolina. Doris?

Doris:

Hello. I would like to ask what you are doing concerning our oceans. They are just so filled with plastics and just so much that is harmful to our fish, our turtles. This is very concerning to me. Thank you.

David Banks:

Great question. Our work in the oceans, it started probably 20, 25 years ago, and it's something we have increased our investment there significantly in the last few years. Our focus is primarily in two areas. One is in ocean protection because an incredibly small percentage of the ocean is actually in a protected area, so it's open to fishing and now in some cases ocean mining. So we're working really hard with governments to protect oceans. A great example of this that we just announced is a project in the country of Barbados where we purchased the sovereign debt of the country of Barbados and renegotiated that debt with the government of Barbados. Through that effort, the government of Barbados got a lower interest rate, lower payments, and they agreed to protect 30% of their marine area in the country of Barbados. So it's a great win for conservation, it's a great win for the finances of Barbados, and it didn't cost us a lot to do that. We're trying to execute this in a number of places around the globe to increase the scale of protection.

David Banks:

The second area that's important for us is changing the way that fisheries are managed. One of the most important areas is something we call electronic monitoring where large-scale ocean fisheries can have cameras that are linked directly to regulatory agencies to manage the catch of those fishermen so that they can control how many fish they catch, whether or not they're catching the right species, and, through that, better manage the fishery in our ocean. If we can scale up that electronic monitoring, we can make a huge difference in the sustainability of fisheries.

Dave Strauss:

Great.

David Banks:

I could probably talk about oceans for a long time, but we should leave some more time for questions.

Dave Strauss:

We do have another question. We've got William from Charleston. William?

William:

Thanks for taking my call, for taking my question. What I'm particularly curious about is if there's any effort to develop some kind of model legislation like the Wetlands Act to manage the development of rural communities to respect the hydrology, the natural watershed, the natural resources, the green space. Because what I see is that there have been many errors in the past that have cost billions of dollars by filling land, etc., and not respecting the watershed. It's an opportunity for those rural communities not to make the same mistakes again. That's my question.

David Banks:

William, that's a great question. We haven't worked on that yet, but I'm going to talk to our team that works on US policy because we've done similar things around a uniform conservation easement act. All the conservation easements around the United States came from an act that we helped write, and then every state has adopted that act. What you're talking about is the kind of feedback that I need in this role because I can go to our government relations folks and see if there's some opportunity to write something because I think we know what works and what doesn't work and providing that information to rural communities so that they can enact the policies to better manage those lands. It's a great idea. Thanks for that.

Dave Strauss:

Yeah, William, great question. Well, this has been an incredible conversation. Thank you, David. I do have a question for you. If there's one thing you want our listeners to take away from this conversation, what would it be?

David Banks:

Dave, where I sit and you're working in this all the time, it's easy to get down and have feelings of real despair about the future of the planet, so the one thing for me is to remain hopeful. I'm around people every day, some of the smartest people in this business that work really hard, work their tails off every day, and they want to make a difference in this. Knowing that you're all behind us is a key thing. So my point to everyone is let's keep our heads up. Let's stay hopeful. We can actually make a difference in this work, but we need to do it now. So thanks everyone for your time tonight. It's been a pleasure speaking with all of you.

Dave Strauss:

Thank you, David. I really appreciate that. We have one final poll question. Do you feel that this live Q&A was informative and insightful for you? Press one for yes. Press two for no. Thank you to everybody for joining us tonight for this live call. I can't thank you enough for all of your support for our cause. We'll be following up with a survey by email. If you're not on our email list, go to nature.org and sign up. David, I just want to just thank you for being our guest this evening and taking these calls and answering these questions, which were wonderful questions. Unfortunately, we couldn't get to every question, but if you have any additional comments, please press one to leave a voicemail for us. We always value your feedback, and we will certainly get back to you. Thanks again for your time. Have a wonderful evening. Thank you.

Dave Strauss:

Good evening and welcome to tonight's live Q&A with Joni Ward, The Nature Conservancy's director of global conservation programs. I'm Dave Strauss director of membership at The Nature Conservancy, and I will be your moderator this evening. I'm looking forward to hearing your questions. This is a live event with lots of opportunities for you to ask questions and share your thoughts. If you have a question for tonight's speaker, please press zero on your telephone keypad either now, or at any point during the event. Your questions will help guide tonight's discussions, so please ask away. If you've just joined us, welcome to tonight's live Q&A with The Nature Conservancy's conservation leadership. We are thrilled to have Joni Ward director of The Nature Conservancy's global conservation programs with us tonight. She is here to talk about urgent conservation priorities and answer your questions.

Dave:

If you'd like to ask a question, press zero on your keypad at any time. Thanks again to everyone for are joining us for this live discussion. Your support means so much to the work we do with The Nature Conservancy. And I really glad we have this chance to connect with each other tonight. Our featured guest, Joni Ward has a distinguished career in conservation. We are honored to have her here to talk with you, answer your questions and share her perspective on how we will continue working with safeguard the lands and waters that sustain us all. Joni leads, a team that works with staff around the world to maximize The Nature Conservancy's conservation impact globally. She has been with The Nature Conservancy for more than 20 years previously serving in various leadership roles within the conservation science team, including science director for North America, deputy director for central science and science director for the state of Wyoming.

Dave:

She is a trained ecologist experience consulting for the US Forest Service and other environmental agencies, welcome Joni. I know our supporters on the phone will have great questions for you tonight. Again, if you'd like to ask a question during tonight's telephone town hall event, or if you have any comments for our speaker, please press zero at any time to get in the queue to ask your question. There are several hundred people on the line, so we won't be able to get to everybody, but we will try to take as many callers as possible. We'll also have a couple chances for you to share your thoughts with a few interactive polling questions as we go along. Let me hand it over to you, Joni, to welcome those who have just joined us and share a few of your thoughts before we open up the lines for questions, Joni.

Joni Ward:

Well, thanks so much Dave for that introduction and thanks to everybody for taking an hour out of your busy days today or this evening to join us on the phone and for all that you do to support The Nature Conservancy at this critical time for people and the planet. Now, I am so lucky because I get to spend my days steep in The Nature Conservancy's conservation work day in and day out. And so I'm so grateful to have the opportunity to hear from all of you tonight who are helping to fund the work of my team and so many others across the US and over 70 countries where we work. And every day we are all working so hard because this is a unique moment in time.

Joni:

What stands between us and mission success, it's a dual crisis of climate change and biodiversity laws and the impacts to nature, to plants and animals around the world is unprecedented. And I'm sure that you've seen the findings from the latest UN climate report, and it's really hard to read, but we need to look at this information as a reason to keep fighting and to not lose hope. Now, to be sure hope is not a guarantee of a better future, but instead it's the knowledge that our actions matter. And today they matter more than ever because we've got a lot of work to do and not a lot of time to do it, but it can be done. TNC, we've always been grounded in science and the science it shows us that it's possible to meet the ambitious climate targets that have been set out by the Paris Agreement and the biodiversity targets of conserving 30% of lands and by 2030.

Joni:

But we have to act now, unfortunately in Nature Conservancy, we're poised to make a big contribution because we've got a great and unique combination of skills, relationships, assets, and support, and caring people like all of you who are on the phone with us tonight, who believe that we do more to change the trajectory of our planet. And the world, it needs the best of us, of all of us, if we're going to be successful in meeting these enormous challenges. And it's only together that we will find a way. And that's why at TNC, we've looked at how we can make our best contribution to help dramatically reduce the rate of peace laws and drastically cut carbon emissions. Now, my team, we led the effort to bring together Nature Conservancy staff from around the world to identify a few key areas where we can make the biggest difference between now and 2030, like using the power of nature to tackle climate change.

Joni:

Forest and grassland, they pull carbon into every growing root leaf and stem. And so nature has a fundamental role to play in making sure that our children and their children have a stable climate. And so our goal is to remove or sequester 3 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions per year. That's the same as removing 650 million cars off of the road. We're also ramping up our legacy of land protection. We aim to conserve two and a half million square miles of healthy lands. That's an area that's twice the size of India. Now we have that big ambitious goal because we need to give nature the room that it needs to thrive. And a thriving and vibrant future for all living things, it's only possible if local communities are shaping decisions about the lands and the waters that they care about so deeply.

Joni:

And so we're also increasing our work on based conservation efforts to support 45 million people around the world who depend on healthy lands, oceans, and fresh water for their livelihoods and their wellbeing. Now we know these goals are bold and yes, they're very ambitious, but so much can occur in a single lifetime, our lifetime. But we have to act now. Now is the time to live up to our promise as the largest environmental nonprofit in the world and make a meaningful difference for nature. And I'm so glad that all of you are on this journey with us. We have much to do together.

Dave:

Thanks Joni. And welcome to anyone who just joined us, it's a privilege to have Joni Ward, The Nature Conservancy's director of global conservation programs with us tonight for this live Q&A discussion on conservation priorities. As a reminder to ask a question, please press zero on your telephone key pad at any time. While we wait to get our first caller, I want to say thank you again to everyone participating in this virtual town hall event tonight on behalf of all of our staff and scientists, I wanted to thank you for your loyalty and generosity, your support means so much. We are United in our mission to protect the lands and waters on which all life depends, but each of us is inspired to act for different reason. So I wanted to ask a quick poll question to get a sense of why protecting nature matters to you to respond, press the corresponding number on your telephone keypad.

Dave:

The poll question, why do you choose to help protect nature? Press one, if you want to preserve beautiful lands and waters. Press two, if you care about saving endangered species. Press three, if you're concerned about climate change. Press four, if you want to keep natural resources healthy and clean. Press five for all of the above. Press six for other. Again, why do you choose to help protect nature? Press one, if you want to present are beautiful lands and waters. Press two, if you care about saving endangered species. Press three, if you're concerned about climate change. Press four, if you want to keep natural resources healthy and clean. Press five for all the above or press six for other.

Dave:

Your answers will help guide our discussion and we'll have the results for you in just a bit. Be sure to press zero, if you'd like to ask a question live tonight. Tonight's event is meant to be a dialogue about issues that are important to you. So we sent an email survey asking participants what question they most wanted Joni to answer tonight? The majority of the supporters said, this question was top of mind for them. And that's where we'll start. The top question was, how can communities help solve the climate and biodiversity crisis? Joni that's an easy one, right?

Joni:

That is an easy one, thanks Dave. It's a great question because we all want to contribute to solutions that will help nature and the planet thrive. Without a doubt, as I said in my opening comments just a moment ago, this is absolutely the decade for decisive action. The actions of individuals, they make a difference. Community action, it's a really powerful way to galvanize individuals together for even more impact. Here's some really great news biodiversity and climate, they're interrelated. And this means that when communities take action to maintain healthy lands and waters, they're also going to be helping counter the effects of climate change. So let me explain what I mean by that. So depending on where you call home, there are likely habitats that are important for wildlife that are also powerful for storing carbon, and that helps to remove emissions from our air.

Joni:

So for example, in coastal areas like Florida and Texas mangroves help buffer the impacts of storms and they also store vast amounts of carbon. And that's really good for our climate. Now, I live in Colorado and here in the Western US, our forests are critical for providing habitat for wildlife and also storing carbon. And so community action that work to protect and maintain the health of habitats like forests, like mangroves that will also help tackle the climate challenge and communities can do this work by reaching out to local state and federal agencies who are responsible for managing the lands and waters where you live. So another way that communities can make a difference is in investigating where their energy comes from and working with utility companies to transition to low carbon sources like wind and solar by also being sure to provide reliable energy that people need.

Joni:

Now, we've done that here in my hometown of Boulder, Colorado, and this effort, it started over 10 years ago when we voted to have our own energy utility. And over time, this led to an agreement with our energy company, Xcel Energy, where Xcel will continue to provide Boulder with power, with the goal of 100% renewable power generation by the year 2030. Now that's a really powerful outcome that's driven by local community action. My first answer here with a plug for local groups. So whether that's The Nature Conservancy or others, there's a vast amount of knowledge out there about important lands and waters for biodiversity that also have climate benefits and this information it's available to communities who want to understand more about how they can use their collective actions to make a meaningful difference. So that's a great first question, Dave.

Dave:

Great. Thank you, Joni. Appreciate that. Let's get to our first caller on the line. As a reminder, you can press zero at any time on your telephone keypad to ask the question live tonight. We'll try to get to as many as possible. So listen for your name. Once you get into queue, we have Glen from Ohio. Welcome Glen.

Glen:

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Dave:

Absolutely. Feel free to ask your question, Glen.

Glen:

One of the things I run into I'm in a rural area in Ohio, I run into folks that don't really believe in change that much, but then when you about get, them convinced, they start pointing their finger and saying, "We can't do it all," they're acting like we're trying to do it all. And I know there's a whole bunch of countries that's involved in that, not just us. They point their finger at countries like China and those kind of places. And when in fact we're the biggest consumers of energy on earth. So how do I approach those folks?

Joni:

Thanks Glen. That's a great question. And we're starting out with a tough one right away and the climate conversations can be really challenging and because we know that the climate news, it's not good. It hasn't warmed as fast in any time in human history and carbon dioxide levels haven't been this high for at least 3 million years but all those sort of facts and figures, sometimes they really don't move people to understand that we have to take act all of us all around the world. I think the best thing that you can do, Glen and this may not be a completely satisfying answer is, stay in the conversation because it's just so important for all of us to be listening to each other and listening to that point of view and understanding that yes, the United States... You're right, we are one of the biggest emitters and there are other big emitting countries out there, but it's going to take all of us together.

Joni:

The United States, as one of the leading emitters, have the responsibility to step up and help lead because frankly it's part of our legacy and we want to have, a sustainable future for us all. Maybe one of the ways to pursue it is to make it a more personal conversation about the benefits to the things that your friends and neighbors really care about. That can be hard to find, and so one suggestion I have for you is because it's hard to talk about climate, The Nature Conservancy actually has a handy guide that it's available through our website on nature.org it's called Let's Talk Climate. There's some basic steps there where you don't have to be somebody like me, a scientist who just rattles off a bunch of data and information because what we know is that doesn't really move people.

Joni:

And so what you'll find in this guide is some basic steps that will help you make a connection of what people truly care about, because I think what's happening with your approach Glen is that, that's not moving them. So what you have to do is find that connection that you both have, that maybe it's a little closer to home about the impacts of climate. And so my modest suggestion is try The Nature Conservancy's, Let's Talk Climate guide and try and find that common ground and build from there. And thank you for being in those conversations because we don't talk about climate enough. And so I just want to say thanks for being willing to even be in conversations with your friends and neighbors. So thank you for your support and your question.

Dave:

Great question and Joni, great to move people to Let's Talk Climate guide there's really good information in there. I want to quickly share the results of the first poll before getting to our next live caller. I'm so happy to see the 23% of you said that you care about making sure beautiful lands and waters are protected. I definitely can relate to that. Let's take another question from the phone. As a reminder, you can press zero at any time on your telephone keypad to ask a question live tonight. We have Fran from Michigan. Fran, welcome.

Fran:

Thank you. We have a local Conservancy in our community here in the larger Tri-County pretty much area. And I know about some in the UP, and I'm wondering how the large Nature Conservancy relates to and cooperates with those local conservancies and if that's common around the country or even in other countries. Thank you.

Joni:

Hi Fran. Thanks for your. Yeah, thanks for the question. It's a really good one. And the answer is absolutely yes, The Nature Conservancy we partner with other conservancies. I believe what you're referring to assume is other land trust and The Nature Conservancy happens to be the biggest land trust globally. And what's happened really happily since we've started back in the 1950s is the proliferation of hundreds, I think even thousands of land trust here in the United States. And so what's so fantastic about that is we're all working together to conserve the critical lands and waters here in the United States. And so we absolutely partner with them and there's a national organization called the Land Trust Alliance and we're very close partners with them and they make sure that all land trust follow the same rules so that we make sure that we're managing the lands and waters really well under the same rules, which is really important.

Joni:

And the other thing that we do is we share our science information with the National Land Trust Alliance. And that way, the information that The Nature Conservancy has about important places is shared all throughout the United States. So lots of really powerful partnerships. And then The Nature Conservancy also, we work in 70 countries around the world. So we have similar kinds of partnerships, it's not quite land trust outside of the United States. That's very much sort of a United dates construct if you will, but we have lots of partners that we work with, because we absolutely have to these big goals that I mentioned to all of you at the beginning of the call, The Nature Conservancy will not achieve those on our own. We know that we're one small piece of the puzzle. And so we're deeply interested in partnerships. That's something that we are based on and that we do all around the world. Thanks for your question.

Dave:

Thanks Joni. It's always great to hear about our breadth of work with our partners specifically around land. It's amazing what we do, not only in the US, but across the world. Let's take another caller. We have a Lilly from Lake City Texas.

Lilly:

Yes. The reason I wanted to get some information, we have a lot of construction going on here and what can I do maybe go to city council or whatever to have what we call nature corridors. We have a lot of wildlife that's being displaced. We have coyotes coming into the community, Bobcat and the rabbit population is really being depleted here. The Homeowners Associations in the area won't allow you to put solar panels on your homes in the front of the houses, which to me, I don't understand. But what can I do as an individual to make a difference? I'm already doing the wind and solar for my energy, I'm already recycling. I've been a donator to The Nature Conservancy for years and advocated it on every platform that was available to me. So what can I do?

Joni:

Well, gosh Lilly, it sounds like you're doing an awful lot already. So thank you so much for all of your supportive of The Nature Conservancy and everything that you're doing and your community. I believe I heard that you are living in Texas. So one suggestion is to go ahead and reach out to our Texas chapter and see what they're doing for the state, and then understand if they're working more locally in your community. Because what I love about The Nature Conservancy who I've been here for over many years now, is this very unique attribute that we have of really local information that we have in every state in the United States. And then our ability to apply that globally. But in this case, my advice is start with our chapter in Texas to understand what kind of information they might have that would be most applicable to the issues that you care deeply about.

Joni:

Because I think that they could give you the information around if you want to maintain corridors, for example, for that wildlife, to be able to move. There's probably tips that the local chapter could provide to you. So I think that would be my advice because you're already doing so much when I think about, what can we all do to do our part to make it a better world, you're doing those things in terms of, if you can replace an activity that will reduce your carbon emissions and you can reduce your carbon footprint, you're doing that with solar panels. I guess the other thing I would suggest to you is to go ahead and plant the tree. We'll probably talk a little bit more about pulling carbon from the atmosphere, but Lilly, it sounds like you're doing exceedingly well. And I would just suggest some outreach, if not to The Nature Conservancy to another local environmental NGO that might be available in your community there and understand how you might connect with them to have a bigger impact on your community.

Dave:

Great, thanks. Great question, Lilly. Thanks Joni. I would also say, we do have an online action center, The Nature Conservancy and work to participate in petition and writing your congressperson is another way to actually engage. And with that, we have a have another poll question. Many of our members are actively already speaking out more on conservation policies through our online action center. I'm curious how many people have participated. So I want to take a minute to do a quick poll. Press one, if you've signed a pledge or a petition or some other policy action on our online action center. Press two, if you have not visited our online action center or press three, if you don't recall, but would be interested in learning more about our action center.

Dave:

Again, press one, if you've signed a pledge or petition or some other policy action on our action center. Press two, if you have not visited our online action center or press three, if you don't recall, but we'll be interested in learning more about our action center. Let's go back to a few more questions from the folks on the phone. As a reminder, you can press zero at any time on your telephone keypad to ask a question live tonight. We have Margaret from Martinsburg, Pennsylvania, Margaret. Margaret, are you with us?

Margaret:

Yes.

Dave:

Oh, excellent. Margaret so you'll ask Joni?

Margaret:

I have a big yard and I was just wondering how important it's for me to plant trees in my yard.

Joni:

Margaret. That's a great question. Is it important? Yes. It's important every action that we can take to help the environment is helpful. Certainly planting a tree, it does a couple things. It could potentially provide a nesting site for some local birds for you. And then it also as that tree grows, it's going to store carbon, which is very important for attempting to improve climate change. And so, it may seem like plant a tree is going to have a small impact and that's true on one level, but if you do that and many others do it... And then importantly, as you are a supporter of The Nature Conservancy, we're able to do that at a scale that really has a meaningful impact on storing carbon and then really making a difference as we try and tackle climate change. But I would encourage you, plant a tree if it makes you feel better and it connects you with nature.

Joni:

Because I think everything matters. It will help the environment. Certainly try to get a native tree, a tree that you don't have to really fertilize or you wouldn't have to use a lot of water. I hear where I live in the west, that's critically important. So my biggest advice is check in with your local professionals to understand what are some native trees that I can plant in my backyard, because that's going to, I have a more of a likelihood of providing habitat for the plants and animals that live in your part of the world. And then also be able to do that in a way that isn't going to take a whole lot of resources in order for you to keep that tree healthy and alive. So by all means, please do plant a tree. They're just so wonderful. But please do check in with your local folks there to understand what are the best native trees to be planting?

Dave:

Thanks, Joni. I think in the spirit of Margaret, I think we should all plant a tree sometime this week. Let's take another question from the phone. We have John from Fort Collins, Colorado. John.

John:

Yes. Do you hear me?

Dave:

Yes, sir. Please ask your question.

John:

With climate change, things are going to change, that's a given. I know that we're going to lose some things that we care for. In Colorado, we're not going to have more water and the amount of cold water fisheries is going to decline. So how does The Nature Conservancy choose what to work on to save? If we know that we're going to lose things, how do we choose where to do our work?

Joni:

It's a great question. And happily for The Nature Conservancy, this is very much in our wheelhouse. We've got scientists who that have been working on that question for literally decades. And back in the day before we were fully aware of the impacts of climate change, we used all information to identify the most important places for us to save. And that's based on a lot of ecological information about the distribution of habitats and where plant and animals are. And so we've got a really deep rich history in doing that and it helped us know where to focus our work. And what we've done in the past 20 years, knowing that the impacts of climate are happening and you're right, it can be hard to think about, well, where are those places that we should say that are resilient in the face of climate change? And here in the United States, a fellow by the name of Dr. Mark Anderson has made this his life's work over the past 20 years.

Joni:

And they have mapped TNC scientists what is called a resilience and connected landscape and what this is, is it using attributes of nature where we can understand the places in the United States that will be the most resilient over time. And that means for plants and animals. And we've got that all mapped out and it that's another resource that is available online through our website. And so what's so powerful about that is as climate changes, we have the grounding to know where of these places that we need to be saving that's going to give nature of the room that... It's hard to imagine a tree moving that they actually are. They are migrating up to as it warms, they're moving up the mountain ranges.

Joni:

That's the kind of information that we've used in order to understand where are these places that as the climate continues to change, we're making good bets. And so we have that information for the United States. We're expanding it now to Canada, up into Alaska. So those are the maps and the information that our teams use in order to focus our work and get the best return on investment for the work that we're doing now. So thanks for your question it's a really good one.

Dave:

Yeah. Thanks John and thank you Joni. I want to quickly get the results for our second poll question. 25% of you said you have taken one of our policy actions, the pledges and letters to Congress that are in our online action center are a chance for supporters to add their voices to critical conservation policy issues. It's a way for you to speak up for nature, be sure to visit nature.org/act, to see the urgent issues that need your voice right now. Let's take another question from the phone. You ready for another one Joni?

Joni:

I'm ready. Let's hear it.

Dave:

We have Christine from California.

Christine:

Yes. Can you hear me?

Dave:

Yes, Christine.

Christine:

My question is how do we balance between protecting land and wildlife versus the need to produce our own energy so that we won't be reliant on foreign country? For example, gas in California is on average over $6 unless I go to Costco and wait in long lines for f$5.50 per gallon.

Joni:

Christine, it's a great question about, about how to have that balance. And, and it's the question where for The Nature Conservancy, we have to determine what's the best role that we can play with our mission, with our skillset in order to try and to contribute to this really perplexing challenge that you've identified. When we think about how to balance protecting wildlife with developing energy, the information that I was just talking about a moment ago about that we have as scientists to understand where are the important places, not only in the United States, but all around the world that are critical for biodiversity to make sure that we've got biodiversity into the future? We use that information and make it publicly available, especially in California, we've been doing this quite a bit in the Mojave Desert, as the solar arrays are going up.

Joni:

What we do is provide information and make sure that we can cite those renewables in the right places so that they don't have a detrimental impact on wildlife because that's something that I don't think it at The Nature Conservancy, we can solve the escalating gasoline prices. But what we can do is promote renewables and also promote them in a way that we don't have to have really negative impacts on biodiversity. And so we're doing this in the United States, as I said, we've done it in the Mojave Desert. We've also done it in the Midwest. We have a tool that's called Site Wind Right, so that's specifically about wind and it's an online mapping tool that shows developers where these wind projects can be sited with the least impact. And the other piece of this that TNC scientists have done is, we've done the analysis to show that we can have renewables and we actually don't have to break up the Prairie.

Joni:

We don't have to put them in places that right now are intact and are important grasslands for example. Most of the countries in the world, the 10 highest emitters and that includes the United States. We already have plenty of converted areas, such as marginal farmlands, former mine lands and brown fields, where we could place the solar energy, where we can place the wind turbines, where we're getting our renewables, but we're not making nature suffer as a result of needing to move away from and getting to a low carbon energy sources. So with The Nature Conservancy, we do our part in this and hopefully everybody will do their part so that eventually, these expensive gas prices will come down.

Dave:

Thanks Joni. Let's take another question for the phone. We have Joy from Missouri, Joy.

Joyce:

Good evening. I think you said Joyce and I am from Missouri.

Dave:

Oh, is it Joyce? Oh, Joyce. Welcome.

Joyce:

Well, is it Joy or Joyce? Let's make sure I don't cut out someone else.

Dave:

It's Joyce. Yes, it's you.

Joyce:

Oh, hey, thanks a lot. I'm no longer a young person, but I'm not so old that I've given up or that I no longer care. So my question is, how often does The Nature Conservancy revisit its long range goals, short term goals? Similar to a question just recently asked was then do you base those reassessments on where there is need or what the need is? Thanks so much.

Joni:

Thanks Joyce. Oh boy, that's a really good question. And The Nature Conservancy, I would say that we... I'm just sort of laughing because what we know amongst our staff is that we are pretty relentless at very consistently evaluating if we're doing enough. We pretty regularly reevaluate, have we set ambitious enough goals? And what we do is, especially now in this era of climate change, we align our goals as an organization with global commitments like the Paris Climate Accord. And so we've got our climate goal is one portion of that, it's a very ambitious portion. The TNC's one small part that everybody around the world has to play. And so when we think about our goals, what we do is we understand what's important for the world. And I know that can sound a little over overwhelming, but the reality is we are all connected.

Joni:

And we know that now with climate change. Quite candidly, when I started in The Nature Conservancy 20 years ago, we just weren't quite thinking about our work that way. And frankly, it felt a little bit easier because we could work in a local landscape and feel really good about it. And we can still do that today, but we do that work with our eye on the bigger global goals that we truly have to be working on as an organization. We keep the long view of what's required for mission success. And we very regularly check in with ourselves and make sure that we're doing everything that we possibly can with donor dollars, with all of you who trust us to make the biggest impact that we possibly can. So we look long and we're always making sure that we're making enough progress towards those long goals. So it's a very active assessment that we do within the organization quite frequently. So thanks for your question, Joyce.

Dave:

Great, thank you. Joni I wanted to pause and say, thanks so much for these rapid fire responses. There's such good questions. And I see so many more on the queue. There's several hundred people on the line, so we won't be able to get to everybody, but I wanted it to try to take as many callers as possible, thanks for your patience. Again, to ask a question, please press zero and get into the queue. Before we take the next caller, I wanted to go back to the responses to our first poll question. Because many of you said you chose to protect name because you care about endangered species. Joni, I have a question for you. I know you're passionate about wildlife. Wondering if you can share some thoughts about the best ways to protect threatened species.

Joni:

Thanks Dave. It's true, I am indeed passionate about wildlife and birds in particular are my passion and even more specifically, birds of prey. Many years ago when I was doing my master's research, I studied a rare bird of prey called the Northern goshawk. And if you live in an area with forests and if you're really, really lucky, maybe you've seen one of these elusive and magnificent birds and the goshawk's the I studied over 20 years ago, they lived in a place called the Jemez Mountains in Northern New Mexico. But it's a very different Jemez Mountains today than when I was studying there. Why is that? Well, portions of my study area, they've been burned over by wildfire, not once, not twice, but multiple times. Now, fire in these forest, it's normal but the fires that have been burning recently, they've they've really been anything but normal.

Joni:

So fire in the Jemez it's burned so hot that trees in some part of the forests, they're just not coming back. And instead they're grasslands and so much of the forest and trees that goshawks call home, they're gone. And so much of the Jemez that I knew and that I loved is also gone. And so what can we do to help goshawks and other rare and endangered species? The most important thing to do is to continue to advocate for their homes, for the protection and strong management of lands and waters and protection. There's some doubt that it's important, but my goshawk story, I think makes it clear that protection alone, it's not sufficient. And so what we need is community based collaborations where people work together to ensure that forests and grasslands and oceans and rivers, that all of us love that they're managed well so that they can meet the needs of nature and also of people.

Joni:

If we do that over time, then wildfires like those that have happened in the Jemez. They'll once again burn in a healthy way and they'll regenerate and revitalize the forest. And I should mention that collaboration. It is happening in Northern New Mexico, where our TNC team, they're working with local communities and state and federal agencies on forest management. And so I am happy to say that there is still hope for goshawks.

Dave:

Thanks for sharing Joni, really appreciate that. So much of our work at TNC has done in partnership with communities and private land owners. And we're also lucky to have many nature Conservancy, protected areas across the country that are open to the public. And I have a quick question. Have you ever visited a Nature Conservancy preserve? Press one, for yes. Press two, for no and press three, for not sure. Again, have you ever visited a Nature Conservancy preserve? Press one, for yes. Press two, for no. Press three, for not sure. And we've got another caller we've got Sharon from California, Sharon.

Sharon:

Yes, I'm here.

Dave:

Great.

Sharon:

My question is what are some small things that people and especially children can do in their everyday lives to feel like they're actually contributing in some way to the solution? I know that we do the water conservation and recycling, but what else can they do to feel like they're helping because things are so overwhelming is like, what can we do?

Joni:

Thanks Sharon. It's a great question. All of the small things add up and I know that sometimes can sound like it's not true, but if you think about it, there are over 7 billion of us on earth now. And if only half of us started doing one thing that would be three and a half billion actions and that would just be an amazing amount of progress. And so what can our kids do? They are doing all of the right things as they think about recycling and thinking about, trying to have a lighter footprint on the earth and so reusing things as much as they can and asking their parents about, where does their energy come from? And maybe we could use a little bit less and maybe we could eat a little bit less meat than we normally would and install low flow water fixtures.

Joni:

So we're actually using less energy, all of that really helps. And then it's certainly true to like go out there and plant it tree. So if we can all go out and plant trees, if we all go do that this week, we will be contributing to pulling that carbon dioxide out of the air. And we all do that together. All of those small actions will add up. And then once again, I will just say, if the parents of those children out there could contribute to The Nature Conservancy, we're able to make an impact at a very significant scale. And that is not an insignificant thing to do. So I think we all need to take our individual action. Kids definitely need to get involved with nature, understand the connection that we all have to nature and how so much of it, we rely on nature for our water. We rely on nature for shelter. So to have that understanding of the connection and then as we all can understand that connection begin to take actions as individuals and then hopefully collectively and also by supporting organizations like The Nature Conservancy.

Dave:

Great, thanks Joni. Just a reminder to ask a question, please press zero. To get into the queue. Let's take a brief minute to get the results of the last poll question. 56% of you, which is wonderful visited a Nature Conservancy preserve. It's awesome. I'd love to hear it and if you want to learn more about where a preserve is near you can visit nature.org. Another question ready for another one Joni?

Joni:

You bet.

Dave:

We've got Beth from Washington DC. Beth, are you with us?

Beth:

Yes, thank you. My question is which lands and waters are most at risk in the face of climate change?

Joni:

Thanks Beth. That's a great question. And what's hard to answer about that question is that our climate, it is truly a global system. And so when it's stressed, as it is now, there's really nowhere on earth where the impacts of the change to our climate system aren't felt. But that said, if I have to answer the question about where is it being felt the most, I would have to say the Arctic. And the reason for that is that global temperatures, they are warming twice as fast in the Arctic. And that makes the Arctic region that's probably at the highest risk from climate change impacts. And so why is the global temperature rising so much more quickly in this vast and beautiful region? And it's a phenomenon that's known as Arctic amplification and that's caused by melting ice. And it has to do with the fact that ice is more reflective and it's less absorbent of sunlight.

Joni:

And so as that ice melts, we see more of the ocean and we see more land and it's just this cycle that goes and that's why the temperatures are increasing so much more up in the Arctic. And that's a problem for the plants and animals. They need time to adjust to that changing environment and they just don't have that time given the pace of temperature change in the Arctic. And so it's pretty sobering up in the Arctic, but as I mentioned, what we do in The Nature Conservancy is we flip that script and understand, well, where are the places that are most resilient? And so that's this climate resilience and connected network mapping that I mentioned a few questions ago, where we have an understanding of really focusing on those places that are going to give nature the best opportunity to be thriving as we continue to have our environment that's impacted so much by climate.

Dave:

Thanks, Joni. We have another question from the phone. We've got Mark from Madison, Wisconsin, Mark.

Mark:

Hello. Good evening. My question...

Dave:

Mark. Hello?

Mark:

Yes, sorry. Hello. I just put on my phone. My question is we've got some terrific goals. I'm wondering what monitoring or dashboard might be used to track how we're doing in terms of progress against these goals.

Joni:

Oh, thanks Mark what a great question. If you could see me, you would see my big smile. It's a terrific question and it's hard to do, but I'm very proud and happy to say that The Nature Conservancy, we have these ambitious goals and we have a data management system that all of our teams use. It's got a catchy name called The Hub and our teams, they enter in information about the progress that they're making against these goals. So what's powerful about our goals is they're galvanizing. So no matter where we work in the world, we're all working towards the same goals. And so we use this data management system inside the organization, and we actually have a dashboard and our CEO, Jen Morris, just the other day said, "Gosh, I love this." Because we can just see the progress that we're making and we've just gotten going and we've got a ways to go, but we're a science based organization.

Joni:

And so we're absolutely committed to monitoring and being able to track our progress. So we do invest deeply in that. And so our teams are committed to it, the entire organization can see it. And so that's what The Nature Conservancy is doing. And then we share our practices and that information with our partners as well, because as we all know, TNC has an important role to play, but it's going to take so many of us in order to achieve our truly ambitious goals that the world needs. TNC will do our part will hold ourselves accountable by monitoring our progress. But it's really going to take all of us in order to meet the goals that we need to meet, to have a sustainable planet into the future, but monitoring absolutely critical. And we are very much committed to it.

Dave:

Great question Mark. Thanks Joni. Let's take another question from the phone. We have Michael from DC, Michael.

Michael:

I'd like to ask what type of efforts are being made internationally to reduce the carbon footprint of major players and countries?

Joni:

Michael, that's a great question. The answer for The Nature Conservancy is, gosh, there's a lot of players that have big footprints. And so what difference can The Nature Conservancy make? And I would say one of the most important places that we're investing deeply is actually in agriculture. And I don't know if some of you are maybe surprised to hear that, but Nature Conservancy is deeply engaged in agriculture because food it's the most basic and essential way that we all interact with nature. And in agriculture, it is the world's largest industry. So it has a very significant footprint because it is the single biggest human use of land and water. And so, what we all know, I think intuitively is that producing food it's not a nature neutral activity. And so depending on how we do it can be environmentally destructive or it can actually shelter, biodiversity, and also provide benefits to climate by sequestering carbon.

Joni:

And so we all need to eat. I think we all ate today. We're going to eat later tonight, but the way that we produce food, it's really different all around of the world. Especially when you think about things like specific farming practices and market forces and policy, and there's so many other things to consider. And so here's what TNC is doing, we've got 15 globally representative diverse food growing areas that we're either already engaged in or underway. And what we're doing is we're working with food producers, we're working with the water managers and agribusiness in ways that are both good for the planet and the people. And let me just give you a couple examples of what I mean. So for example, in Argentina, the Gran Chaco, we're working with soy farmers and cattle ranchers, policy makers, food processors to protect one of South America's biggest tropical forest.

Joni:

And what we're doing is improving crop yields, conserving water supplies, reducing carbon emissions and supporting family farmers. So another example that we have is here in the states, we work both in the Chesapeake Bay and the Mississippi Basin, and we're partnering with farmers here in the states and working with extension agencies across these truly massive watershed. And our goal there is to improve soil health, reduce fertilizer runoff, and restore waterways that are truly famous for their fisheries in the case of the Chesapeake and also for the Gulf, but they suffer some of the worst water quality in the US. And so I would have to say that our partnership with agriculture and really getting into the details is probably one of the most impactful ways that we're attempting to work with those players out there that truly have a big footprint.

Dave:

Great. Thank you, Michael. Thank you, Joni. Next question. Our next caller, we've got Tessa from Scottsdale, Tessa.

Tessa:

Everyone thank you so much for having me for taking my question. I couldn't have agreed more with Joni's comment at the beginning of the time as now for a decisive action and wanted to take a little bit of a different spin on some similar questions that have been asked to ask you if you expect for more volunteer opportunities to ramp up for The Nature Conservancy in particular. Obviously that's been shut down the past couple years with the pandemic, as I've been searching to get involved with The Nature Conservancy directly. So I was hoping to hear if we can expect that to ramp up soon.

Joni:

Thanks Tessa. Thank you for your support. And yes, we will ramp up soon. I think we're all in the Conservancy really itching to get out and be engaging with our volunteers. I think the best way that you can do that is go to nature.org and search for volunteer and there's lots of opportunities. And as you said, things have been shut down, especially here in the states, but our local state chapters are indeed starting to ramp that back up again. So I would encourage you to keep going to the, a website, check out what opportunities are available. And I happen to be a big fan of the Arizona chapter. They're a great team there, and I'm sure that they're going to be increasing their volunteer opportunities there as well, because we need everybody really pitching in. And so please do, and thank you for your willingness to pitch in with TNC and really make a difference. But I think nature.org volunteer is a good place to see what the latest opportunities are.

Dave:

Great, thank you Joni. This has been an incredible conversation. Joni, if there is one thing you want our listeners to take away from this conversation, what would it be?

Joni:

Wow, thanks Dave. Gosh, it's hard to do one thing. Here's one thing that I hope everybody remembers from tonight. We know that we're facing really big challenges with biodiversity loss and climate change. Yes, they're complex. They're massive. And what I want you to remember is that they're connected. And so every action that we take it truly does matter in helping to turn the tide and having a world where nature and people can thrive. And to do that, all of us need courage. We need the courage to take on these daunting challenges together. We need meaningful collaboration from everyone who cares about safeguarding, our natural world, our leaders, farmers, ranchers, heads of corporations, foresters, indigenous people, communities, and people like all of us who are on the phone together tonight.

Joni:

And so by being here and with your generous support of the Conservancy, all of you are playing such an important role in helping to solve these really challenging issues. And together, I just know that we can find a way to drastically reduce emissions and halt species loss around the world. I am so optimistic about what we can accomplish. And so my deepest, thanks to all of you for your loyal support of the Conservancy.

Dave:

Thank you, Joni. We have one final poll question for you. Do you feel that this live Q&A was informative and insightful for you? Press one, for yes. Press two, for no. Again, do you feel this live Q&A was informative and insightful? Press one, for yes. Press two, for no. And thank you everyone who joined us live for this call. I can't thank you enough for all you do to support our cause. We'll be following up with you with a survey by email. So if you're not on our email list, go to nature.org and sign up. Joni, thank you for being our guest. You're wonderful. I know our members and our supporters loved hearing from you and really appreciate your time. Unfortunately, we couldn't get to everybody's questions, but if you have any additional comments, please press one to leave a voicemail for us. We always value your feedback. Thanks again for your time and have a wonderful evening. Good night.

Dave Strauss:

Good evening, and welcome to tonight's live Q and A with Jan Glendening, the Nature Conservancy Regional Managing Director for North America. I'm Dave Strauss, director of membership of the Nature Conservancy and I'll be your moderator tonight. I'm looking forward to hearing your questions. This is a live event with lots of opportunities for you to ask questions and share your thoughts. If you had a question for tonight's speaker, please press zero on your telephone key pad either now or at any point during the event, your questions will help guide tonight's discussion so please ask away. If you've just joined us, welcome to tonight's live Q and A with the Nature Conservancy conservation leadership. We are thrilled to have Jane Glendening the Nature Conservancy Regional Managing Director for North America with us tonight. She's here to talk about urgent conservation policy priorities and answer your questions.

Dave Strauss:

Thanks again to everyone for joining us for this live discussion. Your support means so much and I'm really glad we've had the chance to connect with you tonight. Thank you for being part of the Nature Conservancy community. Our thoughts are with those of you who have been affected by hurricane Ida, the devastating wildfires across the West and other extreme events and I hope you and your loved ones are all safe and well this evening. Thank you for joining the call. I'm so glad you're able to participate in this live telephone town hall event. Our featured guest, Jen Glendening has a distinguished career in conservation. We are honored to have her here to talk with you, answer your questions and share her perspective on how we continue working to safeguard the lands and waters that sustain us all. Jan has been with the Nature Conservancy for more than 20 years, previously serving various roles within the Iowa chapter, including director of philanthropy and state director.

Dave Strauss:

Prior to her current role she also served as the director of the great Plains division as TNC North America Regional Managing Director. She oversees the region that comprises 50 US state chapters spread across eight divisions in 20 countries with the recent inclusion of some of the Pacific Islands. The North America region has over 2,500 staff and more than a 1000 trustees. As managing director Jan works to empower all of North America business units, programs, and divisions to read and execute conservation work across the region. Welcome Jan, I know our supporters on the phone will have great questions for you tonight. Again, if you'd like to ask a question during tonight's telephone town hall event or if you have any questions for our speaker, please press zero at any time, we'll also have a couple of chances for you to share your thoughts with a few interactive polling questions as we go along. Now let me hand it over to you, Jan, to welcome those who have just joined us and share a few thoughts before we open up the lines for questions, Jan.

Jan Glendening:

Thank you so much Dave and thank you so much for this invitation and that wonderful introduction. I want to thank our members and all of you on the phone today for joining us for this event. I've had the great privilege of working with members since I started at the Nature Conservancy 20 years ago. And I can tell you your support makes all of the Nature Conservancy work and our work throughout the North America region and globally possible. And it really couldn't come at a more crucial time. We're facing the biggest, most complex challenges of our lives with climate change and biodiversity loss, much of what science tells us about these challenges can feel scary and overwhelming. You see stats all the time right now about how quickly we're losing species, how high the sea levels and temperatures are rising and how much more frequently we can expect to face droughts and natural disasters.

Jan Glendening:

And this can be so frightening and disheartening, but fortunately science also shows us it's possible to change course and try a much better path that now will only avoid irreversible damage to our lands and waters, but also helps restore nature. We're at a really pivotal moment. What we do right now is going to have an immense impact on the health of people and nature and our own lifetimes, as well as for future generations. But the window of opportunity to get on that path is rapidly closing and the current pace of conservation is just not enough. We need to do more and we need to do it more quickly. Simply put, we need to ramp up our work if we're going to curb climate change and prevent biodiversity loss. And there's actually something happening right now that is giving us a lot of hope and could be a tremendous opportunity for the Nature Conservancy to really ramp up our work across North America.

Jan Glendening:

As we speak right now there are two pieces of legislation that present our best opportunity to make a meaningful progress on climate change and conservation in the US and these are moving through congress right now. If passed these bills, which are the bipartisan infrastructure bill and the budget reconciliation bill, they would be by far the most significant US investment conservation and action against climate change today. They would be one of the best opportunities for the North America region to achieve huge contributions to the Nature Conservancy 2030 goals. And with the world leaders convening this November for climate negotiations, these bills could also very likely have an impact well beyond North America. Such strong action by the US would be a critical step towards spurring other countries to act boldly. We have a lot of ground to make up, but the opportunity represented by these bills is giving us a lot of hope and momentum.

Jan Glendening:

I hope you'll all take the time to learn more about them and engage however you can. And finally, I want to underscore just how urgent this is for you and me and communities around the world, climate change and biodiversity loss are no longer distant problems. We have hurricanes, wildfires and other climate impacts happening all across the North America region at all times of the year. Unfortunately, science tells us climate change is going to increase the severity of events like these, and that's why it's so important for us to meet our ambitious goals. Right now is about this high stakes as it gets for our planet but I am also relentlessly optimistic. Every day I see incredible support from ranchers, from farmers, from indigenous communities, partners and Nature Conservancy members just like you. It's no exaggeration to say that this is an all hands on deck moment and I'm so glad to know you're standing with us. With that I'll turn things back over to you Dave, to open up the Q and A. I'm really eager to hear from all of you and try to answer your questions tonight.

Dave Strauss:

Thanks, Jan. I really appreciate that and I do agree all hands on deck for sure and thank you to our membership for playing their part. And welcome to anyone who just joined us, it's a privilege to have Jan Glendening the Nature Conservancy Regional Managing Director for North America with us tonight for this live Q and A discussion on conservation priorities. As a reminder, to ask a question please press zero on your telephone keypad at any time, while we wait to get our first caller, I wanted to say thank you again to everyone participating in this virtual town hall event tonight. On behalf of all our staff and scientists, I wanted to thank you for your loyalty and generosity.

Dave Strauss:

Your support means so much. We are united in our mission to protect the lands and waters on which all life depends but each of us is inspired to act in different ways. So I wanted to ask a quick poll question to get a sense of why protecting nature matters to you. To respond, just press the corresponding number on your telephone keypad. So the question is why do you choose to help protect nature? Press one if you want to preserve beautiful lands and waters, press two if you care about saving endangered species, press three if you're concerned about climate change, press four if you want to keep our natural resources healthy and clean, press five for all of the above, press six for other. Let me repeat the question.

Dave Strauss:

Why do you choose to help protect nature, press one if you want to preserve beautiful lands and waters, press two if you care about saving endangered species, press three if you're concerned about climate change, press four if you want to keep our natural resources healthy and clean, press five for all the above and press six for other. Your answers will help guide our discussion as well have the results for you in just a bit. Be sure to press zero if you'd like to ask a question live tonight. Tonight's event is meant to be a dialogue about issues that are important to you. So we sent an email survey last week about asking participants what questions they most wanted Jan to answer tonight. More than 650 supporters said, this question was top of mind for them. And that's where we'll start the top question. How do you leverage private lands and working lands while trying to reach ambitious conservation goals?

Jan Glendening:

Thanks, Dave. And I'm so glad that this was voted the top question. With my history coming from Iowa working in a very much private lands state I have to say that private lands and working lands it's in the Nature Conservancy DNA. And throughout our history, we've worked with farmers and ranchers businesses and other private landowners to really find common solutions that support nature, locally economies and communities. More than half of the lands in the US are privately owned so if we want to achieve our conservation mission we must work collaboratively with private landowners. And we were very pleased to see that the Biden administration 30 by 30 or America the Beautiful initiative proposal really highlights the need to collaborate with private land owners to improve management on working lands and waters.

Jan Glendening:

The America, the Beautiful initiative it's about working with landowners and managers to leverage those lands for the benefit of people and nature, which doesn't just mean setting them aside at protected areas. Improving management on private lands is really key to make sure working lands are managed as sustainably as possible. And just a couple of the ways that we leverage private and working lands for conservation include our work on family owned forest. So I come from a grassland state and an ag state and as I stepped into this North America role, I've been really excited to hear about the work that we're doing in forest and the work we're doing on private forest. More than a third of US forest are steward by individuals and families. So it's absolutely critical that we support their conservation efforts.

Jan Glendening:

And one way that we do that is supporting their access to carbon credit markets. Access to carbon credit markets supplies family forest owners with a sustained source of revenue for implementing conservation and restoration efforts. And the family forest carbon program and the fourth carbon co-op project, both of which the Nature Conservancy helped develop and launch really helped facilitate access to the upfront funding and expertise needed by small landowners to enter the carbon markets. So I think this is really, really important work going forward. We're also doing a lot of work on ag private lands working with ranchers and farmers. We're working on conservation easements but those are just a few of the examples of how we're going to move forward, work on private lands to achieve our conservation goals.

Dave Strauss:

Great. Thanks Jan. As a reminder, you can press zero at any time on your telephone keypad to ask a question tonight and speaking of questions, we have our first caller on the line is Roger from New Hampshire, Roger.

Roger:

Yes. Thank you for taking my question. I'm very much concerned about climate change more than anything else, because it seems that if we don't resolve that issue everything else is going to be down to drain. So I wonder what the Nature Conservancy is doing to highlight that as a need, and I ask because when I get issues of the magazine, I generally don't get this feeling that it's a high priority. Thank you.

Jan Glendening:

Yeah. Climate is a top priority for the organization. So this is a great question Roger, that you're bringing out. In my opening remarks I referred to our work right now that we are really working up at the capital on the infrastructure and the reconciliation bills for climate work. We're also doing quite a bit of work around renewable energy and working on renewable energy deployment too. And it's really key that we help transition here our work going forward in that way. So our work on renewable energy really is focusing around different ways that we can help site renewables in the best way possible.

Jan Glendening:

So how do we get renewables out more quickly out onto the landscape that makes sure that they're done in a way that doesn't further fragment our key natural areas like grasslands and so forth. And then finally, I also think we really need to be focused on nature-based solutions and climate adaptation and natural disasters. And we can do a lot to really try to work to help reduce the harm in communities from extreme weather and so forth. And so there's a ton of work we're doing in this space and I'd really encourage you to go to nature.org and you can find out even more there.

Dave Strauss:

Great. Thanks, Jan. And thanks Roger for your question. Really important for sure. I wanted to quickly share the results of the first poll before we get to our next caller. I'm happy to say that 27% of you said making sure beautiful lands and waters are protected and I can definitely relate to that. I love traveling especially this beautiful country of ours. So let's take another question from the phone and as a reminder, you can press zero at any time on your telephone keypad to ask a question live tonight and our next caller is Barbara G, Barbara.

Barbara Gruver:

Hi, I'm Barbara Gruver. Is that the one you want?

Dave Strauss:

Yes, that's the one.

Barbara Gruver:

Okay. My question relates to the two bills that you said are in congress right now, the budget reconciliation and the infrastructure bills. I'd like you to speak about what parts of them are specifically related to climate change and conservation of resources.

Jan Glendening:

That's a great question, Barbara. And we actually happen to have Tom Coors who is a key member of our North America policy and government relations team on the line here today. And I'm actually going to let Tom step in and help me answer this question for you.

Tom Coors:

That's interesting for both climate and biodiversity. The main key point of the reconciliation package that will address climate change is a clean energy payment program. And that probably once we get more details is going to be the biggest step towards really addressing climate change. And then the second thing is what Jan was talking about a little bit before is that there's a lot of great work that our nature based solutions do protecting forests, protecting grasslands, protecting water that does to actually mitigate climate change as well. So we're actually going to see two where we not only are going to be addressing climate change head on, but we're also going to be looking at how protection of natural resources can mitigate climate change and reduce emissions as well. So we're really excited about the reconciliation bill and similarly in the infrastructure package, there are analogous programs that are going to be promoted in that package as well. So we've got more details that as Jan said up on nature.org and we look forward to working with congress over the next likely several months to get these enacted. Thanks.

Dave Strauss:

Thanks, Tom. Really appreciate the answer. Well, let's take another caller. We have Patricia from Virginia.

Patricia:

Thank you. My question is how much cooperation occurs among the various organizations that are addressing wildlife, the Audubon society, the wildlife association, various groups to try to address climate change and the impact on everything?

Jan Glendening:

That's a great question. And Patricia, we cannot do our work alone. I'll tell you, conservation is extremely complex just like our natural world is very complex and we need a robust set of partners that we are collaborating with, who all see the different challenges and opportunities and systems and so forth out there to really make successful conservation happen. And so we do partner very closely with a number of the groups you mentioned, Audubon and so forth. We also partner with a lot of non-traditional conservation groups, and we're finding more and more success through those partnership. Maybe to tie together with a couple of the other questions that we've had just today we announced a new partnership with Dominion Energy and this partnership is going to provide Dominion Energy itself, which is in Virginia provides energy to more than seven million people.

Jan Glendening:

They are developing one of the nation's first utility scale solar projects on 1200 acres of former coal fields in Southwest Virginia. So these lands happen to be managed by the Nature Conservancy. So this is a really important, unique, new partnership for us that is all about building a clean energy future. It creates jobs, it supports local economies. It protects forests and outdoor recreation by directing energy development toward degraded coal fields and away from helping natural areas. And we're really hoping that this project serves as a model for Dominion and other energy companies for how solar project can be developed without harming healthy natural areas. So that's just one example of the kind of creative partnerships and what happens when we start talking to a lot of people we haven't talked to in the past necessarily.

Dave Strauss:

Thanks, Jan. I really appreciate that site. So it's one of those unusual suspects our organizations or companies out there that you wouldn't typically think we would partner with and there's such a great synergy with that so that's wonderful news. A poll question. So many of our members are actively speaking out more on conservation policy through our online action center. I'm curious how many people have participated. So I wanted to take a minute to do a quick poll, press one if you've signed a pledge or petition or some other policy action in our online action center.

Dave Strauss:

Press two if you have not visited our online auction center or press three if you do not recall but would be interested in learning more about our action center. Again, I'm curious how many people have participated in our online action center, press one if you've signed a pledge or petition or some other policy action in our online action center, press two if you have not visited our online action center or press three if you don't recall but we'll be interested in learning more about our action center. Let's get back to a few more questions from the folks on the phone. We've got Priya Graves. I'm not sure exactly where you're from but Priya.

Priya Graves:

Sorry. I am Priya Graves. I'm from Palo Alto, California.

Dave Strauss:

Fantastic.

Priya Graves:

And I'm curious as to what, if anything Nature Conservancy is doing in the area of regenerative agriculture. I've been reading fair bit about it in places like Australia, which is where my mother came from. It's a very exciting thing that people are doing with this. And I just was wondering what, if anything Nature Conservancy is doing?

Jan Glendening:

Yeah, this is another great question, Priya and I have spent a big chunk of my conservation career working in agriculture and regenerative ag it is a priority for us for the organization. So food is the most basic and essential way that we interact with nature and agriculture is the world's largest industry. Landowners, farmers, ranchers, and so forth, all have a huge role to play in helping us to meet our conservation goals. So the way we produce our food becomes one of the most powerful solutions for nature. And we're also finding really strong synergies between our agriculture work and carbon and so forth as well. Many landowners, farmers, ranchers they also care deeply about the land and conservation and are among our greatest allies in conservation.

Jan Glendening:

I grew up on a family farm and my dad always told me if you can take care of that land, that land will always take care of you. Unfortunately, the way the agriculture system is set up, they don't always have farmers and ranchers. They don't always have the tools or resources including financial that are needed to really help implement those best stewardship practices. So one of the ways we're doing that is to really ensure that federal policy provides the right incentives and support to these groups to help ensure that they benefit by being part of the climate solution. So TNC is a founding member of the food and ag climate Alliance, and has developed an advocates for federal policies and recommendations to ensure that producers have every opportunity to be part of the climate solution in a way that really sustains their livelihoods and benefits the environment.

Jan Glendening:

And what we're talking about are the types of practices and working with farmers and ag associations, things that will help reinvest in the soil, that regenerative piece that you're bringing up here. So how do we help build and get more carbon into the soil, for example how do we make it healthier that really can help us and not just sustain but prosper going forward. It's really important that we think about that diversification in our ag work. The great question.

Dave Strauss:

Yeah, absolutely. Thanks, Jan. Let's take another question from the phone. We have Judith from New York. Judith, are you with us? One more time, Judith. Well, let's go to the answers to the poll question. So 22% of you said you have taken one of our policy actions, the pledges and letters to congress that are in nine action center, our chancellor supporters to add their voice to critical conservation policy issues. It's a way for us to Speak Up for Nature, be sure to visit nature.org/act, to see the urgent issues that need your voice right now. So we are now going to move to our next caller, and that is John from Texas John are you with us?

John:

Yes, I'm here with you. Thanks for taking my question. My question is somewhat related to the last, how are changing weather patterns affecting crop yields in the Great Plains area and how is Nature Conservancy involved in discussions considering this?

Jan Glendening:

Yeah, that's another great question. I can give you very specific answer in a couple of months when my dad's done with harvest on what yields are looking like and everything else here shortly. So it's this mix when you start looking at yield, but I don't have the specifics right in front of me on the Great Plains, but we are seeing an increase in technologies coming out of agriculture companies that are allowing them to develop corn tolerance or seed tolerance and so forth or seed varieties that are more tolerant to drought and so forth.

Jan Glendening:

So that part is going, but what we're losing often is top soil and some of those really key places with these extreme weather events. And so as many of you may know, soil is one of the most diverse habitats on earth, and it's really crucial for food production, clean and abundant water supplies in the stable climate. And so us working really closely with agriculture and with the federal government, we're really trying to, again, make sure we're moving and growing robust crops while protecting water sources and really storing carbon to help reduce the greenhouse gas emissions.

Dave Strauss:

Great. Thanks Jan. I have a question written in from Jane actually from North Carolina and she's asked what are some TNC program projects that you think are innovative and new approaches to conservation?

Jan Glendening:

Oh, that's a really good question. I think the one I just spoke about, about the Dominion Energy partnership is one of them that I think is really innovative thinking about how do we take old coal production lands and turn them into solar in a way that can benefit local economies. That's a great one. There is another project that we have going on. Another example we have going on in the Mississippi, we've done a lot of work here working on flood plain mapping to try to really think about where can we restore the most critical habitats around the Mississippi river flood plain. As many of you may know, flooding is becoming more and more productive and unpredictable and it can be just catastrophic. And at the same time restoring the floodplain and improving the floodplain has really strong benefits for wildlife, for reducing flooding, for outdoor recreational opportunities and so forth.

Jan Glendening:

And so we partnered together and put together a floodplain prioritization tool. That's really helping them maximize the multiple benefits of flood risk reduction, nutrient capture, and ecological impact. And we're using that tool with local governments, state governments, and so forth to really help drive where do we protect the flood plain, and how do we help local communities make decisions that can benefit both people and nature. So those are just a couple of projects, there are so many, that's one of the neat things about the position I'm in. We have a 2,500 staff working across the region doing innovative work really trying to push the needle and figure out how we can find that place where conservation and nature come together and people.

Dave Strauss:

Great. Thank you. As a reminder, you can press zero at any time on your telephone keypad to ask a question live tonight. Let's go to Brandy.

Brandy:

Hello. Can you hear me?

Dave Strauss:

We can, welcome.

Brandy:

Okay. I'm live in Erie, Colorado right now, but I was born and raised in Wyoming. So I love wildlife and I love open spaces. And I think maybe 20 years ago I would have been maybe pro wind energy because I'm all for renewable energy. I have solar panels on my home, recently my stepdaughter who's a pilot just two weekends ago took me on a flight over Denver and the front range. And it really made me sad to see how very few rooftops have solar panels on them or people are using energy not enabling all the solar power energy that can be obtained. And I'm wondering, I'm hearing from people in Wyoming that there's a Rail Tie Wind Project that's going to eat up, they're putting wind farms eating up all over Albany county, which is prairie land and this obviously is going to... I've heard it's one of the biggest in the country and that they're using giant maritime turbines.

Brandy:

The problem obviously with the wind energy is A, migratory animals, birds kill the open space, but these turbines are gigantic and they're not made of renewable materials. And they have to be, when there's a problem with them hauled they take energy to be hauled, to set up, take energy to be hauled to landfills. That again is another problem with utilizing land for landfills for these materials and I've wondered if all these different charities I'm giving money to, if anybody is trying, first I wanted to know Nature Conservancy where they stand on the wind energy and also if they've thought of reaching out in a different way, which is to try to get the cities to get the solar panels on structures that already exist.

Jan Glendening:

Yeah. Well, this is a great question because we are actually actively working in both areas. I know we have a number of state programs that are working on rooftop solar. We've got a couple of them here in Iowa where we're working with local communities on group solar buys to reduce the cost for local landowners and then allowing them to get out in cities. New York has a solar map, the Long Island as well. So that's an area where we've worked and I see that growing, especially if we're able to be successful this fall with the bills that are in congress right now. The other thing we're doing is we have a program called Site Wind Right. And Site Wind Right is really the Nature Conservancy work to create an online mapping tool that shows developers where wind projects can be cited that will have the least impact on people and wildlife.

Jan Glendening:

The tool shows where there's really low conflict and with wind sites to meet our climate goals. And it was given an award, the Site Wind Right tool was given an award for advancing climate science by the American fish and wildlife association. The cool thing is our scientists right now are working to expand Site Wind Right for solar energy. So by this fall, we should have a brighter or a broader renewables site platform that can help address climate change and the conservation of biodiversity. So hopefully we have fewer of those eye clashes. I don't know if that's quite the right word or not, but those places where unfortunately the sighting is occurring in a key wildlife areas, what we want to do is try to find the best places where we can put these things so they have that least amount of impact. So it's a great question. It's something that's very active right now in the Nature Conservancy work.

Dave Strauss:

Yep. Thanks, Jan. Our next question is from John from DC, John.

John:

I think that's me.

Dave Strauss:

That is you.

John:

First I'd like to thank both of you so much for taking the time to speak with us all this evening. And thank the Nature Conservancy more broadly for all the work it does. One of the things I so appreciate about the Nature Conservancy as opposed to some other nonprofits is the dedication it has to preserving lands and making that direct effort to preserve these lands that we all love and are so important to our nation's future. And frankly, just our personal enjoyment and that they spend this time doing this rather than focusing on partisan political lobbying and whatnot. As the Nature Conservancy looks forward, what are the biggest obstacles that you see, then what also can the Nature Conservancy members do either through donations or political action or, whatever to help you overcome those obstacles?

Jan Glendening:

That's a great question, John. And thank you so much for your support. It's a good question and partly because I'm hopelessly optimistic on this and so I see obstacles as opportunities. We've talked a lot so far in this call about the importance of private lands and working lands across North America. And I think that's a piece on how do we effectively conserve private lands, but still allow them to make an economic return for people is a piece that we need to think of. People need to be able to live and make, I mean, support their families and so forth, and they care about conservation. So that's one that definitely comes to my mind. I think that the other thing that I honestly worry about is just people getting up in some ways, because there is so much going on in the world right now.

Jan Glendening:

And so I think apathy potentially could be an obstacle or people not caring. Now, hopefully I see so much hope with members like you and talking to people and getting these great questions. Also from the youth, we have so many exciting people even my own kids, they don't question climate change, they know it's real. They want to make a difference in the world. And I hear that time and time again. So I think ways to get involved first, never underestimate the power of a single action that you take, your support of the Nature Conservancy and other conservation groups makes a big difference and we are forever grateful for that. I think also what you can do, not being afraid to have a conversation with your friends, with your family, with people you don't always agree with about conservation and the importance of it goes a long way.

Jan Glendening:

We have an initiative and I'm hoping I'm going to get this right called Speak Up for Nature but we have an initiative right now or Let's Talk Climate that are really, really important about how you individually can start a conversation locally. And there's more on our website on this too, how you can start a conversation locally, local conversations, local people talking in their local community about climate change, about conservation, and it's Let's Talk Climate, can make all the difference here and as a way that you can really engage. So thank you John, for that question.

Dave Strauss:

Yes. Thank you, John. I would also say our online action center or other online action centers are really important, it just gets your voice out there. We do have another call from Idaho, Sandra.

Sandra:

Hello, I think the previous caller very much touched upon my concern. And my question is how is the Nature Conservancy able to approach people or groups who do not believe the climate is changing?

Jan Glendening:

That's a great question. And again, what we've found is it's all about local people having conversations locally. So Let's Talk Climate is a great way to go about doing that and it should be a helpful resource guide that it really makes all the difference. It really does. So farmers talking to farmers, ranchers talking to ranchers, local mayors talking to local mayors about the impacts that they're seeing. Well-respected people in the communities having open conversations are really critical. So I highly recommend you check out the Let's Talk Climate section of our website.

Dave Strauss:

Great, thanks, Jan. As a reminder, you can press zero at any time on your telephone keypad, ask a question live and we our next caller is Kay, Kay.

Kay:

Hi.

Dave Strauss:

Hi.

Kay:

Hi. How are you?

Dave Strauss:

I think we're doing really-

Kay:

My question has to do with, how do you use farm ranch, others, I workers and communities. How can they help and how do you prioritize land protection? Do you work with land trusts?

Jan Glendening:

That's a great question, Kay and yes, we work with land trust and we also work with farmers and ranchers on different protection methods. If we want to be most effective, what I would say generally how we protect lands, we can't guess which lands and waters we should focus on protecting. So I would say the biggest thing we're doing right now is we've been able to use plants to guide us throughout our history. And just this last year Nature Conservancy scientists unveiled a map of the most climate resilient and connected lands across the US. So this map which is up on our website too, it's a roadmap of our natural highways and neighborhoods and it shows where plant and animal species have the best chance to move away from our growing climate threats. And the lands map on this map cover 3% of the lower 48 states.

Jan Glendening:

So as we work to protect 30% of the lands and waters by 2030, we literally have this roadmap that we can use to identify lands that we can keep nature healthy in the face of climate change. And we work really closely with the Land Trust Alliance and have shared this map very publicly with them, with state and federal government agencies and so forth. So it's not just a map for us but it's really a map for the conservation community to use. And then that develops our conservation plans and so forth, and really helps us focus and target our work. We're going to be adding more layers to the map too including a freshwater layer that'll be coming in the next year and also a carbon stock layer. So we have a sense of where we can focus protecting for carbon stocks in addition to biodiversity. So that's really that foundational underpinning that's driving where we do and target our protection efforts.

Dave Strauss:

Great. Thanks Jan. We have another caller. We've got Michael D, Michael.

Michael D:

Yes. I'm in Manhattan, Kansas. And I've been a fan of the Nature Conservancy since I spent the summer of 1962 on a property in Perry, Maine that the owner Cynthia spoke to her husband gave a conservation easement to the Nature Conservancy, which I thought was a great idea. But my question here in Kansas concerns wind energy and what seems to me a stampede by green groups to support a sort of unrestricted wind energy development is causing all kinds of problems in Kansas, not least divisions between conservation groups, several themes that have come up in these conversations that people have been having of conservation groups working together and protecting land owners. And various issues like that are impacted by this, the Nature Conservancy and Sierra club, it turns out have been on the opposite side from automotive Kansas.

Michael D:

And trying to defend the rights of land owners and county commissions in counties in Kansas, where they're fighting wind energy companies that are installing their wind farms on unplowed prairie and migration corridors for hooping cranes. There was one set of wind farms that went up in Marion county and one of the local, well, that's the end of prairie chickens in Marion county. And what can the Nature Conservancy do to get together so that we're not splitting conservation organizations between those who are in favor of green energy, just across the board and people who want to preserve endangered species and wildlife and native habitat, which is being fragmented and destroyed by these wind farms.

Jan Glendening:

Yeah. This is a great question. And I'm not the expert in everything going on in Kansas, but I do know this is exactly why our Site Wind Right tool was developed. So we could really use it as a platform. And we worked very closely, not just with Nature Conservancy staff to develop that, but with a lot of local conservation groups and the state agencies, including in Kansas to help really target where are the best places for energy development and where are the places we want to make sure that we are really protecting those native prairies. And I'm a big fan of the Flint Hills, I've spent some wonderful time in May in the Flint Hills, it's just one of the most beautiful places on the planet. And so we've got to make sure we're protecting those grass lands and making sure we're doing that very collaboratively. And so I would encourage you to reach out to our Kansas chapter and they can talk more specifically about the issues going on there, but this is of high priority for that program.

Dave Strauss:

Great. Thanks Jan. We have another caller. We've got Eleanor from New Jersey, Eleanor.

Eleanor:

Yes. Hello. Thank you very much for what you're doing in Nature Conservancy, but also just as fact that you give us an opportunity to ask questions and things and to speak our mind, maybe on certain things. I noticed that you were talking before about your connection with farmers and ranchers and working with them. And I think that's a wonderful thing to do, but I'm wondering how your relationship or your contact is with the indigenous people in the United States, their traditions and their lifestyle and their knowledge of nature I think is so important. So I'm wondering what your relationship is with the indigenous tribes, particularly in the United States right now.

Jan Glendening:

Great question Eleanor, and a very important one. So indigenous people have sustainably steward lands and waters across North America for thousands of years, and they are really the original stewards of the natural systems. They have extensive experience and knowledge of how to effectively manage and care for nature. And we are growing our partnerships with them throughout the US and throughout Canada as well. So there's more than 1200 indigenous communities throughout the US and Canada. And we've collaborated with indigenous people in more than 30 states and three Canadian provinces and territories. We are really learning that when place-based indigenous communities have the authority to manage lands and waters, it leads to more durable conservation as well as stronger more vibrant communities.

Jan Glendening:

And like I said, we're working to increase our engagements here, maybe a couple of examples. We have the indigenous people burning network. So in 2015, the Nature Conservancy sat down for a listening session with leaders from various tribes of Northern California to learn about how we can revitalize indigenous communities, fire cultures. And from those meetings, these indigenous people burning network was born. Indigenous communities across North America's have long practiced fire management to maintain the health of their ancestral lands. The network brings together native American people working to revitalize traditional fire cultures in a contemporary context.

Jan Glendening:

And the network conducts controlled burns to bring back native foods and fiber, and it connects elders and youth to prepare the next generation of cultural fire practitioner. So we're really excited, that's just one example I know in the Great Plains. Another example is we are working really closely by providing animals from our own bison herds to help restore the ancestral herds of indigenous people. So just two quick examples, again, we're partnering with more than 30 states across North America. So a lot of work going on here.

Dave Strauss:

Thanks for the question Eleanor, on a really important topic. We have another caller, we've got Donna from Oregon.

Donna:

From Oregon and from coastal Southwest Oregon. And my question is how do you really convince people that these experiments discovered that thinning forest and then using control burning after thinning really work the best to stop fires, because the fires would just go along through on the bars floor and not up into the trees. How do you convince people that this is there to use some kind of burning, which people are afraid to prevent them from being absolutely wildfires and gasp, people unable to breathe the way we've been having a problem.

Jan Glendening:

Donna, I am so glad you brought this topic up because it is top of mind for me and for many of our leaders across North America right now. Again, we've been in the middle of another very extended and hard wildfire season out West and I know you're living in that right now. The amazing thing as you're already well aware of fire has a natural role to play on many of our landscapes and we need fire to remain healthy and resilient. In the last a 100s years or so, fire has largely been excluded from landscapes across the US as part a federal policy of fire suppression. So we are really working to shift that. And I want to tell you an example of what happened on one of our properties in Oregon, this fire season just a few months ago. So the bootleg fire, which many of you might have heard of on the phone at our Sycan.

Jan Glendening:

Part of it was on our Sycan Marsh preserve. And it's a great example of the benefits of our firework. So the bootleg fire burned for eight days on our preserve and it largely resisted or obstructed all fire fighting effort. And one of our Oregon fire staffers who has 15 years of experience said the bootleg fire exhibits some of the most extreme fire behavior they've witnessed in their career. But on the eighth day, the fire hit an area where our staff had conducted prescribed fires two years earlier and shifted from being a fire that was moving quickly through the canopy of the trees back to a fire burning on the forest floor, which is exactly what you were just describing. Our staff noticed that the areas where thinning and prescribed fire have been completed, tend to moderate the fire behavior in a way that made it so much safer and more approachable for the firefighters on the ground.

Jan Glendening:

There are numerous places on the preserve that were previously untreated or that were treated only with mechanical thinning, where the outcomes were just dramatically different from the areas where the prescribed burn treatments had occurred. So we can't say with a 100% certainty yet that the previous treatments of thinning and prescribed burning are ultimately what brought the bootleg fire under control. There's too many factors into play on how fire acts, but we are going to be doing follow up research on this and it was definitely a sign and a big sign to our staff who've been working really hard for a number of years on this that we might be headed in the right direction here. So more science, more of us telling the story as we do the science and sharing that broadly is a big part of our plan going forward.

Dave Strauss:

Thanks Jan, this is a great transition to our preserves. So there's nothing like just getting outside and seeing these places and species you're protecting up close. So much of our work at TNC is done in partnership with private land owners and communities and we're also lucky to have many Nature Conservancy protected areas, our preserves across the country that are open to the public. And so I wanted to ask a quick poll question to our callers. Have you ever visited a Nature Conservancy preserve? Press one for yes, press two for no and press three for not sure. Again, have you ever visited a Nature Conservancy preserve press one for yes, two for no, three for not sure. Now let's go and take another question from the phone. We've got Suzanne from New York, Suzanne.

Suzanne:

Yes.

Dave Strauss:

You are all and you can ask your question.

Suzanne:

My question is how do we help this generation of children realize how important such things are? For instance, in my grandson's high school the school let the bus take them to an environment that they had never seen and learned a lot about it, but I don't feel that the children know when we're talking about these things, what it really means. I mean, not to scare them but to help them understand the words that we're using and what they can do about it. It used to be scouts and 4H and all those things are leaving the country and to bring them back to nature I'm wondering, do you have any program at all for that? Thank you.

Jan Glendening:

Yeah, this is a great question, Suzanne and one that's something I think about personally as a parent on am I doing everything I can to make sure my kids understand what's going on in the world today. And the amazing thing I can say about that is I learn more from them daily than what I think I teach them myself to be honest. A few years ago, my son and I were driving across Iowa and for any of you who've ever been to Iowa or from Iowa, there's a lot of corn and soybeans and some beautiful landscapes. And my son as we were driving across, says to me, he says, mom, why didn't we save just a little bit more prairie because the bison and the species that are in the prairie, they deserve lands too. Don't they have a voice.

Jan Glendening:

It was such a proud mom moment to be honest, but it just came out of the blue and I've heard that time and time again. So part of it I think as adults and what I've done just personally, is helping my kids be aware of nature wherever it is. So even just spending time in our backyard and looking for bugs when they were little, little things like that can go a long way in just bringing up people's awareness. Now more directly, what is the Nature Conservancy doing? Well, we support over 130 youth programs across the globe at TNC. And that includes some incredibly aspiring work by young people like the main environmental change makers network.

Jan Glendening:

We have a youth engagement team which is housed in the North America region. And that works to really inform young about conservation issues, connect TNC's community outreach staff with youth across the globe to help drive collaboration. And they work to elevate the voices of our young activists. So there's a lot more that we can be doing and need to be doing and I would think about locally, what more can you do personally and I'm glad you're bringing this up and how do we help have conversations and just help people see and then really listen to the kids too. Listen to what they're saying.

Dave Strauss:

Thanks, Jan. Let's take a brief moment to get the results of that poll question. 57% of you have visited Nature Conservancy preserve that's fantastic. You can learn more about ones near you @nature.org. And now let's go to our next caller. We've got Bill from Santa Monica.

Bill:

Hi, I'm interested in the initiative to get 30% of the lands and waters of United States protected by 2030. I know, and I appreciate that the Nature Conservancy has embraced this goal and the president of the United States has embraced it, but operationally how's it working or how's it going to work? Who's identifying the most high priority lands and waters and formulating a plan to have to start incorporating them into protection.

Jan Glendening:

This is a great question and something we are working on very closely, actually Tom Coors, who is from our North America policy and government relations team happens to be leading much of this effort. So Tom, I'm going to let you take this.

Tom Coors:

Sure. So thanks for the question. This 30 by 30 effort is really frankly kind of a rebirth of how we think about conservation over the next decade, but longer term. I mean, I see this 30 by 30 effort is something that we get to figure where we prioritize investments for conservation and how much conservation is going to be enough then more importantly, how do we influence policy. And so the United States rebrand this global protecting 30% by 2030 goal into something called America The Beautiful, and we put very extensive input into the administration and the administration's recommendations really frankly matched what we had proposed, which is to have a collaborative inclusive approach for conservation, that it should be locally led and locally designed. And that should honor tribal sovereignty and protect priorities of tribal nations, and also that it should be respectful of private property rights and voluntary.

Tom Coors:

And so the question is really how do you operationalize it? And what we have been saying for the last year in change is that we need to do more of what we're doing. We've got a lot of great tools across different kinds of geographies and different agencies, but we need to do more of it. Last year we had The Great American Outdoors Act, which is kind of the first step, but we need to think bigger and we need to think about how we can increase the pace of conservation over the next decade. Because we know that biodiversity loss is a crisis and equal to the climate crisis that we're solving. But we also know that by doing conservation in this America The Beautiful or 30 by 30 contexts, we can actually protect biological diversity, really make advances on mitigating and reducing admissions for climate change and really make an impact in people's lives. So we're embracing it wholeheartedly and we're working very much with the administration and also more importantly with partners on the ground to really advance and accelerate conservation. So thanks for your question.

Dave Strauss:

Great. Thanks Tom. Thanks for joining us. This has been an incredible conversation. I really appreciate everybody on the phone, our members, our supporters. Jan, one last question for you. If there's one thing you want our listeners to take away from this conversation, what would it be?

Jan Glendening:

Oh, that's a great question. Well, first of all, I am so inspired by this conversation. So let me say that and thank you all for your membership and everything you are doing. Tackling climate change and biodiversity loss is going to take extensive collaboration from everyone who cares about safeguarding our natural world. So it's from our leaders, from farmers and ranchers and foresters, fishers, indigenous people, communities, and people like you and me. So all of you and being a Conservancy member are providing a significant contribution towards solving these issues. And you should all feel very proud of the part you're playing in supporting lasting conservation.

Jan Glendening:

If you would like to have your own lasting impact in your own conservation legacy, I'd encourage you to think about a planned gift and we have a variety of ways to help make that happen. Keep pressing forward with the conservation mission, go out and have conversations locally with the work and the issues that you care about and have hope. You are very much the reason for a brighter future here in North America and beyond and I'm just so grateful for your support, for the conversation we've had today and for all of us being together in this great community. Thank you, Dave.

Dave Strauss:

Yeah. Thank you, Jan. We've got one quick final poll question. Do you feel this live Q and A was informative and insightful for you? Press one for yes, press two for no. And we are at the end of our hotel town hall. And thank you to everyone for joining us live to this call. I can't thank you enough for all your support for the Nature Conservancy. We'll be following up with you at the survey by mail so if you're not on an email, lets go to nature.org and sign up. And thank you Jan, I really appreciate you taking the time this evening and answering questions for our members it's really appreciated. And unfortunately we couldn't get to every question, but if you have any additional comments, please press one to leave a voicemail for us. We always value your feedback and thanks again for your time and have a great evening.

Dave:

Good evening, and welcome to tonight's live Q&A with Lynn Scarlett, chief external affairs officer, and Hazel Wong, director of conservation campaigns, for The Nature Conservancy. I'm Dave Strauss, director of membership at The Nature Conservancy, and I will be your moderator tonight. Looking forward to hearing your questions. We'll get started in just a moment. Right now, we're waiting for everyone to join the call and we're expecting a strong turnout, so we'll begin shortly. This is a live event with lots of opportunity for you to ask questions and share your thoughts. If you have a question for tonight's speaker, please press zero on your telephone's keypad. Either now or at any point during the event. Your questions will help guide tonight's discussion, so please ask away.

Dave:

If you've just joined us, welcome to tonight's live Q&A with The Nature Conservancy's conservation policy leadership. We're thrilled to have Lynn Scarlett, chief external affairs officer, and Hazel Wong, director of conservation campaigns, with us tonight. They are here to talk about urgent conservation policy priorities and answer your questions. Thanks again to everyone for joining us for this live discussion. Your support means so much and I'm really glad we have a chance to connect with each other this evening. Thank for being part of our Nature Conservancy community and I hope you and your loved ones are all safe and well this evening. I'm so glad you were able to join us for this unique, live telephone town hall event.

Dave:

Our featured guests, Lynn Scarlett and Hazel Wong, have distinguished careers in conservation and public policy. We are honored to have them here to talk with you, answer your questions, and share their perspectives on The Nature Conservancy's policy agenda, working hand in hand with the tangible conservation work we're known for. Safeguarding the lands and waters and us all. Together, Lynn and Hazel lead The Nature Conservancy's policy and conservation campaigns work at all levels. As chief external affairs officer, Lynn Scarlett directs The Nature Conservancy's public policy work in the US and in the 70 countries where we operate. She is a leading expert on climate policy and is former deputy secretary and chief operating officer of the US Department of the Interior. Hazel Wong leads The Nature Conservancy's efforts to generate conservation funding by placing measures on ballots in states through the initiative or referendum process. In her longstanding tenure with The Nature Conservancy, she has helped raise over... get this... $100 billion in public funding to protect land, water, and wildlife. Thank you for joining us, Lynn and Hazel. I know your supporters will have great questions for you this evening.

Dave:

Again, if you'd like to ask a question during tonight's telephone town hall event or if you have any comments for our speakers, please press zero at any time to ask your question. We'll also have a couple chances for you to share your thoughts with a few interactive polling questions as we go along. Let me hand it over to Lynn and Hazel to welcome those who have just joined us and share a few thoughts before we open up the lines for questions. Lynn?

Lynn:

Thank you, Dave. It's really just terrific to join everybody on this call tonight and so great to be with my colleague, Hazel. Many of you are familiar with our decades-long, on-the-ground conservation work. Our policy work, in the US and around the globe, is central to advancing those efforts. Policy work helps bring conservation funding. You've just heard some of the numbers that Hazel's team has helped to rack up. Think of the recent big success in getting permanent, full funding of the land and water conservation fund. $900 million per year for conservation in perpetuity, essentially. It took us 10 years to really get over the finish line, so policy work is not easy. But policy also helps set the rules of the game. Removing barriers, for example, like prohibitions on the Army Corps of Engineers even considering nature as it looks at infrastructure investments to protect coasts. It also helps to advance incentives. Think, for example, of the farm bill and provisions in the farm bill that reward practices that protect biodiversity and improve soil health.

Lynn:

So policy... Yes, it brings money, but it removes barriers and it creates incentives. It creates rules of the game that help everybody else to march in the direction that we're trying to go. Our efforts unfold globally and they unfold in the Congress and in the states. Over many years, we've helped to bring big conservation victories in states through ballot initiatives. Hazel will talk a little bit more about that. We bring some really unique characteristics to our policy work. We're nonpartisan. We're science-informed. An organization with over 500 scientists on board. We're very solution-focused. What's the problem and how do we solve it? Sometimes I'm asked whether nonpartisanship means that we don't weigh in on tough issues and work on really defending those bedrock environmental laws. We are vigorous and assertive in defending those bedrock laws, but we use that same voice, that voice of science, solution-focused, constructive dialogue, a respectful tone, as we're assertive in saying we need these laws. We need to protect them. Here's what our science shows. We can't unravel them. So we move forward positively. We try to prevent any rollbacks.

Lynn:

With that, I want to turn to Hazel because a really important part of our work are the ballot initiatives. The other [inaudible 00:06:10] that Hazel's team does around the world... Recently, they, for example, were working in the European Union to help our European colleagues build relationships with private landowners to sort of replicate what we have in the US with conservation easements and so forth. Hazel and her team helped our Europeans do that kind of work. So, Hazel, over to you.

Hazel:

Thank you, Lynn. And hello everyone. Thank you so much for your generosity of time this evening and, of course, your support for Nature Conservancy. It truly is wonderful to be on this call and knowing that all of us share a common value and passion for protecting our natural world. As we have all seen in the past six months, this unfortunate pandemic, there is even more of an awakening by people that our natural world is important for our quality of life and overall wellbeing. So, again, thank you so much for your support and for being here. Lynn introduced me, and Dave. I'm Hazel Wong, director of global conservation campaigns, but I'm going to give you a quick background before I dig into work here. I was actually born in the Seychelles and, in many ways, I grew up outside. Whether it was playing hide and seek in the forest, hiking, or partaking in ocean and beach activities, I spent a lot of time outdoors and that was all year round. So, really, this work that I do now and how I show up, it's part of my DNA and it makes a lot of sense that I've actually been at the Conservancy now for 18 years. 18 years of both professionally and personal rewards.

Hazel:

So when people ask me, what do you do? I always happily answer, well, let me tell you. I get a paycheck for using my energy, my creativity, my passion to protect our beautiful, natural world. I will tell you that protecting our beautiful, natural world is capital intensive. It is very costly. We have to rely on private philanthropy and we also, as The Nature Conservancy and a lot of other NGOs, we have to show up and make the case to decision makers at the local, state, and federal level that they must invest in nature. Let me give you an example. The state that I live in, Nevada. It is estimated that, annually, we need 80 to 100 million dollars just for conservation. As all of you know, we have very limited public resources, and so The Nature Conservancy is part of that value system to show up and advocate on the part of nature. Data shows that 88% of on-the-ground conservation funding comes from the public sector. As much in private funds that we raise in the United States, overwhelming amount of money comes from the public sector and some of the policies Lynn mentioned earlier. The farm bill, Great Outdoors Act, and what have you. So, again, lobbying, advocating, is a fundamental part of the work that we do at The Nature Conservancy to protect the places that all of you love and hold dearly.

Hazel:

I am blessed to have a team of 10 that work with our state chapters and our partners to generate funding at the local and state level through the legislating process, but really, with a focus on ballot measures. Every election cycle, many states, counties, municipalities put questions on the ballot asking voters to support conservation financing. If you and I walked into the state capitol right now and said, "Give me $300 million for conservation," they would look at us and go, "Oh, we have education, healthcare, transportation, you name it, that is heavy competition for those dollars." However, if we walk in with our partners and we say, "Okay, we need $300 million for conservation. Let the voters decide and let the voters decide if they want to increase their own sales tax by 3/8 of one cent and that will generate $300 million a year to do the great conservation work on the ground." That is what we do and that happens often. That's what happened in Minnesota in 2008, when voters, 62%, overwhelmingly voted to tax themselves to protect nature. This money is leveraged with private money, with federal money, and local NGOs, agencies. They all do great work for conservation.

Hazel:

Let me give you a quick snapshot of what's happening this year. Things are not... As you can imagine, things are tough out there in the public landscape, so we are very lucky right now to have eight campaigns. We have three in Colorado, Clay County in Texas, Toledo, Ohio, Portland, Oregon, and two state-wide in Michigan and Montana. If all of them pass, we are looking at creating 2.2 billion dollars this election cycle. Unfortunately, we had 10.2 million dollars at stake, but California and New York will not be on the ballot because of the COVID impact. So we're looking at a much smaller take-home this election cycle, which is fine. We're very happy with the outcomes that we... well, with the measures that are on the ballot and will hopefully have a really good outcome.

Hazel:

As Dave mentioned and Lynn mentioned earlier, this body of work has been incredibly fruitful. Over 32 years, The Nature Conservancy have been advocating at the ballot box to generate funding to do the fantastic work and we are looking at $150 billion altogether. From protecting the Columbia plateaus to the Sierra Mountains, the grassland prairies, coastal wetlands... We've even put [inaudible 00:12:03] back in the river. Protected key [inaudible 00:12:05] habitats. And now when you think about national infrastructure and the changing world because of climate, we've actually, in certain places, had to rebuild because of heavier precipitation that was seen because of climate change.

Hazel:

The good news about the work that we do, also, is that we do a lot of research. If we're going to go out there and spend money on a campaign, we want to know that we can win. We do win nine out of 10 our of campaigns. Altogether, in the past 32 years, we've won 235 measures. These campaigns are sophisticated. We poll test the funding mechanism. The messages, the TV ads, direct mail, the get out the vote efforts, and more and more, we are now engaging in digital outreach as well and social outreach. But, lastly, I'm going to reiterate a point that Lynn made. In the polls and at the ballot box, we see that conservation enjoys bipartisan support. We also see time and time again that communities of color across the United States show up and vote overwhelmingly to tax themselves to support nature. It really, truly, at the end of the day... Conservation is something that unites us all and especially at this time when we need the beauty of our world to unite us. So I thank you for your time this evening and I look forward to answering your questions.

Lynn:

Thank you, Hazel, and before we turn to the questions, I just want to join Hazel in emphasizing that we understand these are challenging times. Whether it's the pandemic or hurricanes or the devastating fires that so many communities right now in the West are experiencing or the matters of social justice and racism that Hazel briefly mentioned. We all feel those struggles and feel those tensions. They seem to permeate our communities. But at the same time, I am still seeing, and we are still experiencing in our policy work, a desire to seek solutions. Just today, for example, I took part in a panel discussion on the Hill... or that is virtually on the Hill... with the Congress and others on forestry and interest in reforestation and bringing to bear that climate solution that's hidden in plain sight. Nature. And then, no sooner was that event over, I took part in an event with farmers and others on agriculture. 2000 folks in the agricultural sector wrote Congress saying, we want to be part of the climate solution. Amid the pandemic, amid the strife, amid these challenges, there is a thirst for solutions. There is a thirst for this policy action. With that, we really look forward to hearing your questions. As Hazel said, you're an incredibly important set of partners for us. So I'm going to hand this back to Dave and let's get rolling.

Dave:

Thanks, Lynn. Thanks, Hazel. I'm always impressed by the scale and scope of TNC's impact. And welcome to anyone who just joined us. It's a privilege to have Lynn Scarlett and Hazel Wong with us this evening for this live Q&A discussion on conservation policy. As a reminder, to ask a question, please press zero on your telephone keypad at any time. Again, to ask a question, please press zero on your telephone keypad. While we're waiting for our first caller, I wanted to say thank you again to everyone participating in this virtual town hall event tonight. On behalf of all our staff and scientists, I wanted to thank you for your support over the last few months as we've had to navigate changes to local events and conservation projects in your community. It's been somewhat of a challenge, but we are flexible and working through it.

Dave:

I'm honored that you chose to act on your values by entrusting The Nature Conservancy to care for the places you care about. We are united in our mission to protect the lands and waters on which all life depends, but each of us is inspired to act for different reasons, so I wanted to ask our first poll question to get a sense of why protecting nature matters to you. To respond, just press the corresponding number on your telephone keypad. The question, again, is why do you choose to help protect nature? Press one if you want to preserve beautiful lands and waters. Press two if you care about saving endangered species. Press three if you're concerned about climate change. Press four if you want to keep our natural resources healthy and clean. Press five for all of the above. And press six for other. Again, press one if you want to preserve beautiful lands and waters. Press two if you care about saving endangered species. Press three if you're concerned about climate change. Press four if you want to keep our natural resources healthy and clean. Press five for all of the above. And press six for other. Your answers will help guide our discussion and we'll have the results for you in just a bit.

Dave:

Tonight's event is meant to be a dialogue about issues that are important to you. And so, yesterday, we actually sent out an email survey asking our members and participants what question they most wanted to have answered this evening, so we'll start there with the top response. The question for Lynn and Hazel... At what level are changes in conservation and climate policy most needed right now? Locally, nationally, in the US, or globally?

Lynn:

Well, I'm tempted to sort of cheat and say all of the above. We need action at every single level. We need the ballot initiatives that Hazel is working on locally and in states. We really need US national action. I do want to press pause on that. The US has historically been a leader in conservation. In the previous administration, we've also helped to lead climate action and that in turn has a ripple effect. It joined with China in a bilateral agreement on climate and then all kinds of other nations around the world stepped up and brought about the Paris Agreement. With the US not playing that leadership role, it makes a difference. So I would really like to see the US back in the mix, back in the leadership role, but not because the US on its own can do it all, but because it can be a catalyst and a motivator and a funder of conservation work globally.

Hazel:

I would also add that, at the state level, The Nature Conservancy along with partners led with the I-1631 in Washington State in 2018. While that measure did not pass, to put a tax on carbon, it was the first ever ballot measure to attempt to put a tax on carbon that The Nature Conservancy worked on. We are also very much involved in a lot of the renewable portfolio standards at the state level. And of course the work of funding. This is something that is ongoing and it's the work of funding that we need in order to protect our forests and to also protect our wetlands and coastlines. That is something that we're constantly focused on at the state, local, and federal level.

Dave:

Great. Thanks, Hazel. Thank you, Lynn. I wanted to quickly share the results of our first poll before we get to our first live caller. I'm so happy to see that 37% of you said that you care about making sure our beautiful lands and waters are protected. As an avid hiker, I can definitely relate to that. So let's get to our first caller on the line. As a reminder, you can press zero at any time on your telephone keypad to ask a question tonight. And we have Rosie from Seattle. Rosie? How are you this evening?

Rosie:

Hi. Do I have to say anything for you to hear me?

Dave:

No, ma'am. You are ready to ask your question. Any time.

Rosie:

I was reading your wonderful article in your most recent magazine about Bristol Bay and that the permit now was denied to the Pebble Mine company to proceed with more permitting or whatever they're going to be doing. I want to know do you think we can finally breathe a sigh of relief over this or is there more to come?

Lynn:

There's more to come. We can't quite breathe a sigh of relief. For all the callers, Pebble Mine proposal in Bristol Bay, in Alaska, has been a story decades-long, where one mining company after another has tried to get permits to develop mining in an area that is globally significant for salmon, for other biodiverse, valued, very important to the fishing communities in the area. Truly, mining would be devastating. The Conservancy has long been involved. We have provided a lot of the science that has been utilized in commenting on the various permitting documents along the way. What, Rosie, you're referencing is that there is a pause. Rather than the permit going forward full speed ahead, there's a pause with the administration saying... after they were under quite a bit of pressure... that the science in the planning documents were not sufficient and they needed to go back to the drawing board. So the reason that I say it's a pause, but we can't take a final sigh of relief, is that there will be some other chapters in this story. The good news is the Conservancy is all in. We have a near term plan to continue battling any immediate permit prospects, but then a longer term plan to say, can we help with some long-term, final solutions that just takes mining out of the mix for Pebble Mine and for Bristol Bay?

Dave:

Thanks, Lynn. And thank you, Rosie, for your question. We have another caller. David from Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. David, are you with us?

David:

Yes, thank you for taking my call. We have a ballot proposal in the state of Michigan to continue to leverage tax revenues from exploration of oil and gas on public lands to protect public lands. My question is, isn't it counterproductive to support collecting taxes for gas and oil exploration to pay for public funds when that exploration will inevitably lead to burning more fossil fuels and polluting our environment?

Hazel:

Thank you for that question. It is an ongoing conversation, as you can imagine, and philosophical debate that we have at the Conservancy and in many places. The fund that you just mentioned was put in place, I want to say, in the 1970s. The year kind of shifts away from me. When that fund was put in place, what has happened over time is that instead of... They've put a cap on how much money conservation can receive and what we're trying to do... and all that money at this time... the rest of that money goes into a general fund. So what we're trying to do right now is say, okay, well, the intent of this law was to take that funding and put it for conservation. That funding is going to keep flowing right now. We're not at a point where we're going to stop oil and gas and mining for the time being. That money was promised for conservation. We would like to continue to use that money in the foreseeable future for conservation. So that's where we are right now in terms of thinking about if we don't use it for conservation, it's just going to go in the general fund for the time being.

Dave:

Thanks, Hazel. And thank you, David, for the question. We have another poll question. Many of our members are actively speaking out more on conservation policy through our online action center. I'm curious how many people have participated, so I wanted to take a minute to do a quick poll. Press one if you've signed a pledge or petition or some other policy action in our online action center, press two if you have not visited our online action center, or press three if you don't recall, but would be interested in learning more about our online action center. Again, press one if you've signed a pledge or a petition, press two if you have not visited our online action center, or press three if you do not recall, but are interested in receiving more information. So let's go back to a few more questions from folks on the phone. As a reminder, you can press zero at any time on your telephone keypad to ask questions live tonight.

Dave:

And we have William from Bainbridge Island, Washington. William, welcome. William? Are you still with us? One more shout out for William. So we are going to wait for our next caller, but in the meantime, I do have the answers to our poll. And so I wanted to quickly get you the results from the second poll, which is what I just asked. We had 25% of you said you have taken one of our policy actions. The pledges and letters to Congress that are in our online action center are chances for supporters to add their voices to critical conservation policies. It's a way for you to speak up for nature. And then we have Rocky Face from Georgia. Is that right?

Gretchen:

Yes.

Dave:

Oh! Wonderful. Oh, is this Gretchen? Gretchen from Rocky Face, Georgia.

Gretchen:

Yes.

Dave:

How are you, Gretchen? Welcome.

Gretchen:

Fine. I'm interested in hearing more about the ballot initiative in Toledo, Ohio. An area that I'm from.

Hazel:

One moment. I believe that is a metro park measure. That money will go towards park and then acquisition. I don't have the details in front of me right now, but I can definitely get back with you in the very near future. I apologize. I'm looking at my notes right now and I don't have the details on the Toledo, Ohio measure. Gretchen, let me circle right back to you, okay? Thank you.

Dave:

Thank you, Gretchen. Thank you, Hazel. And we definitely follow up. We have Karen from Alexandria, Virginia. Karen, welcome.

Karen:

Hi. Thank you so much for having me speak tonight. My question is that I've always believed that the health of people and the planet are linked. How should we use nature to prevent a future global health crisis?

Lynn:

Wow, that is such a great question and, of course, really... always having importance, but preoccupying us right now. When the pandemic really went global, the Conservancy did a deep dive look at the science linking zoonotic disease, for example, to certain agricultural and land use practices. We've looked at the relationship between nature and health and many other of those dimensions. There's several things that we're doing on that front to really help people understand that nature matters. Nature's not just nice; it's essential. It's essential for economies. It's essential for health. It's essential for communities. It's essential for biodiversity.

Lynn:

First, there are trillions of dollars being expended by governments around the world on COVID recovery. Now, the initial expenditures were mainly on issues such as unemployment and helping people that were unemployed. Immediate healthcare needs. But we see on the horizon recovery spending that is going to try and be longer term and rebuild economies. It presents a huge opportunity to say, let's not build ourselves into the past. Let's look to the future. Let's look towards a nature-positive future. Let's invest in nature. Let's change our agricultural practices in such a way that we don't continue to have land transformation. So, number one, recovery spending presents a big opportunity. We actually presented, the Conservancy, on the Hill in Washington some ideas for consideration in investing in nature to benefit people's health and the economy in the US. But we're doing similarly very active in Europe and with the EU, in Australia, in Canada, and elsewhere.

Lynn:

But in addition to that, a lot of our work that has been unfolding in cities really presents opportunities for linking nature and health. Expanding tree canopies in cities. Using nature for stormwater management. Our work on water funds to invest in landscapes outside of cities and those natural systems to actually help clean the water and deliver cleaner water into cities. All of those things link nature and health. We're learning more and more everyday about the importance of that linkage. Even mental health links to exposure to nature, for example.

Dave:

Thanks, Karen. Great question. And thank you, Lynn. Hazel, if you want to jump right in there and talk a little more about Toledo?

Hazel:

Thank you, Dave. And Gretchen, hello. I was just sharing with my colleagues here that I've been interim state director of Texas for the past few months and sometimes I have to refocus on the details. But, Gretchen, the Ohio metro park, the Toledo metro park's bond is for $160 million over the next 10 years. It is a mill property tax and it is for repair, development, land protection, maintenance of the parks and greenways in Toledo.

Dave:

Great. Thank you, Hazel. I just want to take a moment to go back to the action center, the online action center, and the importance of it as it is a voice for our members and people who are constituents of The Nature Conservancy. Hazel was instrumental with the membership team in helping launch our online action center and Lynn has personally brought our petitions to policy leaders and meetings on the Hill. So, incredibly important. I'm sure they can tell you just how much these online actions have made a difference in the work they've done. So, Lynn? Hazel?

Hazel:

I will start by saying once upon a time in my previous life, I actually worked for a state senator. We tracked phone calls and we tracked mail that we received on issues. Legislators care about what you care about, what their constituency cares about, and unless we... One of the focus that we need to do as an organization is figure out how to raise a collective voice. What we find time and time again is that people care about conservation on both sides of the aisle but it's not something that is activated at times unless we figure out a way to collectively activate it. And that's why it's so important for us to have this action center to be able to communicate to our membership and others what is happening and why you speaking up now is important for us to collectively get our voice heard as we're also actively lobbying face-to-face in the state houses and in Congress. Lynn, I'll turn it over to you.

Lynn:

Yeah, I'll just add to that. Many of us have on our minds, the recent great success of the passage of the Great American Outdoors Act, permanent funding for the land and water conservation fund that I mentioned earlier. We could not have succeeded... we and our other colleagues in other organization... without an action center. Without the voices of our members, our participants. In that effort... which took years, but really active in the last year as we tried to get across the finish line... we had tens of thousands of people respond to our action request. And it matters. The members of Congress look at that and they say, whoa, this is important to our constituents. We need to stand up and act. It really is important, Dave, so thank you for raising that.

Dave:

Absolutely. Yeah, we're asking everyone to speak up for nature and the way to do it is the online action center. You can visit at nature.org/act. So we want to get back to callers. Our next one is Richard from Hedgesville, West Virginia. Richard?

Richard:

Hello. Can you hear me?

Dave:

Yes, absolutely.

Lynn:

Yeah.

Richard:

Thank you. My question is relating to the fires that are ongoing out west. I was wondering if Nature Conservancy properties are affected by those fires and what The Nature Conservancy's policy is with regard to fire management practices. Thank you.

Lynn:

Thank you for the question. Of course, this is ongoing and so devastating to communities. To your first question, yes, there is a Nature Conservancy preserve that has been affected by the fires in Oregon. We don't know the full extent of the impact, but we do know that there have been impacts on at least one of our preserves. Some of these areas, it's not possible to get into the really understand the full extent of impacts yet. With respect to fire risk reduction, forest management, The Nature Conservancy for several decades has been very active in advancing forest health and including a program called Living with Fire, reintroducing proscribed fire onto the landscape. Many of these places, especially public lands, because of a view over many decades of Smokey the Bear put out every fire, have resulted in large overgrowth of trees and tree stand densities. These are fire-adapted ecosystems. They need some fire periodically. So we have supported something called the Healthy Forest Restoration Act. We have fire teams. We go in and help manage some of these areas to reduce that fuel load and try to reduce the risk of fires. We work with communities on creating defensible space. The communities and their participation is important.

Lynn:

I will say though that that's just one piece of the picture. Because, as you've seen in the news, climate change is contributing or exacerbating the conditions such as extended drought, very dry condition of the forest, disease outbreaks and disease outbreaks that are more extensive than they might have been. All of those make those forests tinder boxes. And so when fires strike, we sometimes get these fires of catastrophic proportions. So there are many solutions. Forest management and forest health is part of the picture, but addressing climate change is part of the picture as well. And there are a number of other interventions, working with communities, too.

Dave:

Great. Thank you, Richard, and thank you, Lynn. We've got another caller. We've got Linda Lee from Richardson, Texas. Linda Lee? Are you with us? Linda-

Linda:

Can you hear me?

Dave:

Yeah, Linda. Yeah. Awesome.

Linda:

Yes, I'm here. Well, my question is very brief because I don't want to sound defeatist. I became interested in environmental issues in 1974 and I am much older now and I'm very tired. Because I have seen so much of the wonderful things that got passed through for defense of the environment, the ecosystem, and when we were in with the Paris climate control conference. I am just wondering does The Nature Conservancy put any money into its legal forces so that we can fight some of the things that are getting thrown at us? To turn back the clock and allow robber barons to go in and cut the trees down, mine, and make the water dirty and heavy metals in the soil. Does The Nature Conservancy join with other environmental groups to sue to stop some of the things that are going on? That's my question.

Lynn:

Thank you very much and I certainly share your frustration, having also been around in 1974 and looking at all of the modern bedrock environmental laws that came foreword at that time and into the '80s. The Nature Conservancy rarely engages in litigation. We do very assertively weigh in with the rollbacks. We have weighed in, for example, on attempts to roll back the monuments. We've weighed in on the Endangered Species Act and the [inaudible 00:41:08]. We've worked in the Congress to actually help reverse or counterman some of these efforts.

Lynn:

Very occasionally, we do weigh in and particularly with amicus briefs. For example, one of the very challenging changes that occurred recently was with the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. It's an act that is a hundred years old and the administration made some changes to it that severely limited its effect. And so I was part of an amicus brief that challenged that change in the Migratory Bird Treaty Act interpretation. The good news is that round one resulted in a victory. As with so many legal cases, there's layer after layer after layer. Our California team weighed in in an amicus brief on a lawsuit pertaining to air quality issues there. It was an issue that our team there has worked on for many, many, many years and they had a particular voice and information to add. So very selectively, we do, but we try more to use our power of influence with influential voices and influential decision makers who can undo or counter these reversals as our primary path forward.

Dave:

Great. Thank you, Lynn. Really appreciate that. We are going to take another caller. We are talking Arnold from Tampa, Florida. Arnold, are you with us?

Arnold:

Yes, I am. My question has to do with the fact that this administration has been bent on destroying national parks and other public lands as well as destroying endangered species, in particular predators. What are we doing to try to counter that activity on the part of the administration? Presenting science in terms of the administration. They ignore it.

Lynn:

Science or the application of science has not been very persuasive, that's true, over the last several years. Again, we have a very vigorous bedrock environmental law defense set of priorities, so we have vigorously weighed in on the Endangered Species Act, on the National Environmental Policy Act, and proposed changes there, as I noted on the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. We try to work multiple channels. Partly, we go up to the Hill. For example, we've been working on the Hill with a lawmaker who is proposing a law that would essentially undo the changes in the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. It is a measure that is getting some traction. So we go that route sometimes. Other times, we go the route of the action center that Dave mentioned to really galvanize thousands of people to weigh in. We do that with our compatriots at other nonprofits as well. That won't necessarily change the minds of the administration, but it can galvanize other lawmakers to raise their voice and change the course of their...

Lynn:

Pebble Mine, though, which was mentioned earlier, is actually a good example where our science and our voice and weighing in with others has been effective. We were able to get [inaudible 00:45:12] on that. Along with others. We never do these things alone. The administration had to push the pause button on that one. So we try to use all the tools in the tool kit. But we try to sustain relations that we're going to need over the long haul to get things done that we need to get done. And so it's an art to be assertive, play defense, build relations, get countermanded voices, and decision makers that can undo some of the negative things that are occurring.

Dave:

Great. Thank you, Lynn, and thank you, Arnold. I really appreciate the question. Before we go to next question, I want to talk about getting outside and enjoying nature. At The Nature Conservancy, we've all been moved out of the office and into our homes and I think one of the silver linings for me is being able to get outside more frequently. I have put lots of miles on my feet, going through trails and walking my dog, and it just makes me really appreciate what we're working so hard to save. So, Lynn and Hazel, how have you been able to get outside and outdoors safely?

Hazel:

I'll just share with you that I live probably less than an eight minute drive from Red Rock National Park here in Las Vegas. The other day, I actually went and got a venti latte, took my camping chair, and just put my chair out there, put my Audible on, and sat there for about 90 minutes and just enjoyed the view. And then went for a quick hike. I thought, why not? Why not just bring my camping chair, sit there, and enjoy the view of Red Rock? So I try as much as possible to get outside and now I'm having coffee in the national park. It's my new thing.

Lynn:

I have a confession. I am a passionate birder. And so every single weekend, first days of the weekend, at 6:00 AM or so, I'm at a local, wonderful, wonderful wetland preserve, where I go birding. Usually, I walk five, six, seven miles. And if you're really interested, you can see my bird photos on Facebook.

Hazel:

And they're beautiful. It's amazing.

Dave:

Yeah, I don't know if many of you probably know that Nature Conservancy has 120 million acres of protected land throughout the country and many of it is open to the public. I'm looking forward to being able to visit some of these one day. My goal in life is to take a camper and travel the country and go visit a lot of those. I'm excited about that. Whenever that may happen. So I wanted to take a quick poll of our callers. Have you visited a Nature Conservancy preserve? Press one for yes. Press two for no. Again, have you visited a Nature Conservancy preserve? Press one for yes. Press two for no. And, now, let's go to our next caller. We have Blake from Bristol, Tennessee. Blake, welcome. Blake, are you-

Blake:

Hello?

Dave:

Blake! How are you? Is this Blake?

Blake:

Yeah, this is he.

Dave:

Well, welcome. Feel free to ask your question.

Blake:

My question is... In regard to the Paris climate agreement that was just now... the current administration had just pulled out of it... and considering that other nations had also done it as well, my question is, what will happen now to basically the environment now that that has happened and could we end up seeing ourselves in another similar Dust Bowl like we had during the 1930s?

Lynn:

So the Paris Agreement still exists. The US is the only country in the entire world that has pulled out. Other countries are still committed. They have set goals to reduce their emissions. And those countries are moving ahead. Perhaps sounding a little bit Pollyannish or like I have rose-colored glasses, I also see some other good news even in the US, which is that we're seeing an unprecedented engagement by companies saying, okay, climate is the problem. The US isn't acting. We've got to act. And they're making pledges. So Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, the list goes on and on. They're accelerating and elevating their commitment. We have a big partnership with Amazon to help them invest in nature's climate solutions.

Lynn:

I get heartened when I look at the private sector, who has said, we can't wait for the Congress, we can't wait for the political leadership in the United States. We're going to power forward. I get heartened when I look at the states. Hazel may weigh in on some of our ballot initiatives on climate action at the state level. Many states are powering forward. They've said, okay, pulled out of the climate agreement federally, but we're still in. We're plowing ahead. We're setting renewable portfolio standards, energy efficiency standards. We are very involved in the northeast on a transportation and climate initiative. Now, having said that, the problem is urgent and we're nowhere near on the trajectory that we need to be. So I have great hope that the US will get back in the game at the federal level even while companies and states and cities and other countries keep tearing forward.

Hazel:

I would add, Lynn, that after we... United States... withdrew from the Paris Agreement... The US Climate Alliance is a bipartisan coalition of 25 states. 25 governors have signed on and are committed to reducing greenhouse gases. Those 25 states actually represent 55% of the US population. And so we are seeing the beauty of decentralization of power. We are seeing some actions in the states. At the end of the day, some of the states are the biggest polluters are not part of this alliance. So we do need for the United States to be part of the Paris Accord eventually again, but the good news is that there's actually state actions that are happening. Governors realize that something must be done. They have the power to do something and have signed on with the US Climate Alliance to work together to reduce greenhouse gases.

Dave:

Great. Thanks, Hazel. Thanks, Lynn. Just quickly, a brief minute for results from the poll. 49% said you have visited a Nature Conservancy preserve. I think every time I've asked that poll question, that is by far the highest, so kudos to everybody on the phone. Another caller. We have Tiffany from Salisbury, North Carolina.

Tiffany:

Hi, good evening. Thank you so much for taking my call. Listening to this conversation, I'm going to modify my question just a little bit. Because I so appreciate all the opportunities to participate at a national level politically. I'm very concerned... Even here in North Carolina, where The Nature Conservancy is doing good work around recovery and resilience, at the local and state level, those are not political issues that are addressed by candidates. So when I'm researching who to vote for, and that's one of my priorities, I'm finding it really, really difficult to pick people who are like-minded that I want to see in office. I am so convinced that we have to make this change at the local and state level if we want real change at the federal level. I know that's probably outside the purview of The Nature Conservancy, but do you know what's the best way for us to make this a local political issue? Who do we partner with locally so that politicians have to speak to these issues when they're running for office?

Hazel:

I'll take this, Lynn and Dave. This is the problem that we see time and time again. Politicians are out there polling and they're asking open-ended questions about what do you care about and people are responding the economy, now the pandemic, healthcare, education. So until this day, unfortunately, we do see climate change and the environment, what we call a secondary issue. When we poll on our issue, we isolate it. We ask questions about it. We see the numbers go up. But politicians, typically they ask open-ended questions. This is why it is incumbent upon you to outreach to your decision maker and you are telling them what you care about. Again, going back to using your voice and being active in your community and taking a stand. Because otherwise, you're absolutely right. They're asking these questions. They're not seeing it topped on the polls, so they're not talking about it. And we need to individually and collectively at The Nature Conservancy also uplift the issue. I tell you. We're in constant battle to uplift the issue. That's what we do all the time, but to your point, it is... It's rough out there. Let's just put it that way. Especially right now. With everything happening. We see it in the polling. So I encourage every single one of you to use your voice personally on this one.

Dave:

Speak up for nature. I think that's what we need to do, for sure. So we are coming towards the end, but before we wrap up, I want to ask Lynn and Hazel... If there's one thing you want our listeners to take away from this conversation, what would it be?

Lynn:

Well, if there's one thing to take away from this conversation, it would be that each and every one of you and your voice matters. It really links to the speak up for nature comment that Dave just made. It does matter. So speak up for nature. Take part in our action center, so that you have an easy way to speak up for nature. And retain some optimism. I always say, you see what you look at. We can look at headlines and things look very discouraging, but then you can look down in communities, in individual states, with other partners that we partner with, and you begin to raise hope again because you see some good conservation going on.

Hazel:

While my boss is on this phone right now, Lynn Scarlett, I also feel as if I work for every single one of you. At the end of the day, your commitment to The Nature Conservancy, your commitment to conservation, we have all in many ways have linked hands together and we, in essence, work for you. You have 4000 plus foot soldiers at The Nature Conservancy doing fantastic work and you have probably about 500 of us working in the policy arena. Well, maybe not so much 500, but quite a good bit of us altogether, touching the policy arena. And that's because of your support. That's because of how you show up and what you do in your own backyard. So thank you. Without you, there is no way we would be able to... I wouldn't be able claim all these successes by any means, so I appreciate everything that we do. And just know that we share the same values and we're working on your behalf. So thank you.

Dave:

Thanks, Lynn and Hazel. I would say from all our members to the policy team, we do have the best and we really do fight for nature. We do have one final poll question for you. If you feel like this live Q&A was informative and insightful, press one for yes, press two for no. Again, press one for yes, press two for no. We have come to an end. Thank you to everyone for joining us live for this call. I can't thank you enough for all of the support that you provide for The Nature Conservancy. We'll be following up with a survey by email, so if you're not on our email list, go to nature.org and sign up. And thanks, Lynn and Hazel so much for being our guest this evening. You both were tremendous. Unfortunately, we couldn't get to everyone's questions, but if you have an additional comment or comments, please stay on the line and you'll be able to leave a voicemail at the end of the event by pressing one. We always value your feedback. Again, thank you again for your time. Have a wonderful night.