Communities around the world are contending with accelerating climate change and finding ways to adapt. Through networks and communities of practice, courses and workshops, research, and publications, the Lincoln Institute identifies and shares promising practices for land-based greenhouse gas mitigation, and adaptation and resilience. With partners, we bring together elected officials, community members, and key planning and policy staff to facilitate the transfer of knowledge, strategies, and promising practices to scale up effective climate solutions.
We are demonstrating the economic, environmental, and public health benefits of integrating nature more fully into cities, working with ecological systems rather than against them. Design with Nature Now (2019) and Nature and Cities (2016) feature photographs, articles, and essays by leading international architects, landscape architects, city planners, and urban designers.
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Storymap: Land-based Climate Solutions from Around the World
This StoryMap features a growing library of case studies that illustrate the role of land use and policy in mitigating and adapting to climate change. Featured case studies range from the Life Vimine Project in Venice, Italy, to the Watts Rising Transformative Climate Communities Project in Los Angeles.
In July 2022, we published a special issue of Land Lines magazine that features articles on the growing practice of community-led relocation, the link between climate action and property value increases, and land as an essential component of climate solutions.
By many accounts, Costa Rica has been a unique Central American success story—“a beacon of Enlightenment” and “a world leader in democratic, sustainable, and inclusive economic growth,” according to the prominent economist Joseph Stiglitz.
A nation of about 5 million people roughly the size of West Virginia, Costa Rica has been punching above its weight particularly in the realm of sustainability and climate action: a pioneer in eco-tourism; successful in getting nearly all of its power from renewable sources, including an enterprising use of hydro; and a leader in fighting deforestation and conserving land with its carbon-soaking rainforests.
The Land Matters podcast welcomed two special guests recently who know a thing or two about this country: Carlos Alvarado Quesada and Claudia Dobles Camargo, the former President and First Lady of Costa Rica. They are both in the Cambridge, Massachusetts, area this year—she is a Loeb Fellow, part of a mid-career fellowship program based at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, and he is a visiting professor of practice at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.
Former Costa Rican President Carlos Alvarado Quesada and former First Lady Claudia Dobles Camargo at the Lincoln Institute offices in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in April 2023. Credit: Will Jason.
Also in the studio was Enrique Silva, vice president of programs at the Lincoln Institute, who oversees the organization’s research and activities globally, and has years of experience in and familiarity with Latin America.
The conversation, recorded at the Podcast Garage in Allston after a visit by the couple to the Lincoln Institute, included reflections on leadership and climate action, and what it’s been like to take a year to decompress after an eventful time in office, from 2018 to 2022.
Costa Rica has much to show the world when it comes to the implementation of targeted sustainability practices, Quesada said. “We’re not saying people have to do exactly the same [as we did], but we can say it’s possible, and it’s been done in a model that actually creates well-being and economic growth,” he said. “Back in the day, people would say it’s impossible—‘if you’re going to create protected areas, you’re going to destroy the economy.’ It turned out to be the other way around, it actually propelled the economy.”
After seeing big successes in the countryside, the interventions have turned to urban areas. “Costa Rica has done such an amazing job in nature-based solutions, not so much on urban sustainability,” said Dobles, noting the ambitious National Decarbonization Plan she launched with Quesada, which aims to reach net-zero emissions by 2050. “In order to decarbonize, we really needed to focus also on our urban agenda.”
A big task was reinvigorating public transit, starting with a new electric train that would have spanned the city of San Jose. Quesada’s successor shelved the $1.5 billion project, demonstrating the common mismatch between long-term projects and limited time in office. A pilot project to electrify buses was implemented, however, to rave reviews. The couple says they are hopeful the train will be revived.
“I know that this is eventually going to happen. Sometimes you have political setbacks,” said Quesada. “Your administration cannot own throughout time what’s going to happen, but you can plant positive seeds.”
Costa Rica has been nothing if not creative in addressing the many dilemmas inherent in climate action. Open-ore mining is banned, for example, but entrepreneurs figured out a way to extract lithium from recycled batteries.
“That’s very linked to the discussion of the just energy transition, where the jobs are going to come from, where the exports are going to come from. While there’s a huge opportunity for many developing countries which are rich and are endowed with minerals and metals . . . we need to address those complexities,” said Quesada.
Dobles added, “When we talk about decarbonization, we cannot exclude from that conversation, the inequality conversation. This is supposed to provide our possibilities of survival as humankind, but also it’s a possibility for a new type of social and economic development and growth.”
Former First Lady Claudia Dobles Camargo makes a point as former President Carlos Alvarado Quesada looks on. The pair visited the Lincoln Institute office to discuss their climate and sustainability initiatives in April 2023 while spending a year at Harvard and Tufts universities, respectively. Credit: Anthony Flint.
Reflecting on being in the land of Harvard, MIT, and Mr. Bartley’s Burger Cottage, Dobles said she has been immersed in “the whole academic ecosystem that is happening here . . . just to be, again, in academia, sometimes just to receive information, not having the pressure of having the answers . . . . It’s been wonderful.”
“Being a head of state for four years of a country, it’s an experience that I’m currently unpacking still,” said Quesada. “I’m doing a little bit of writing on that, but you get to reflect a lot, because it’s a period of time you live very intensely. In our case, we were not only working with decarbonization, with the projects we mentioned, we [were also working] with the fiscal sustainability of the country. We had COVID. We had [the legalization of same-sex marriage].
“We tend to train ourselves for things that are outside of us, like methods, tools, knowledge,” he said. “There’s a part of it that has to do with training ourselves, our feelings, our habits, our framing, our thinking . . . to address those hard challenges.”
Carlos Alvarado Quesada served as the 48th President of the Republic of Costa Rica from 2018 to 2022, when his constitutionally limited term ended. He won the 2022 Planetary Leadership Award from the National Geographic Society for his actions to protect the ocean, and was named to the TIME100 Next list of emerging leaders from around the world. Before entering politics, he worked for Procter and Gamble, Latin America.
Claudia Dobles Camargo is an architect with extensive experience in urban mobility, affordable and social housing, community engagement, climate change, and fair transition. As First Lady, she was co-leader of the Costa Rica National Decarbonization Plan. Her architecture degree is from the University of Costa Rica, and she also studied in Japan, concentrating on a sustainable approach to architecture.
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The Hardest Working River in the West
A StoryMap Exploring the Colorado River Through Data
Although not the largest or longest river in the World, the Colorado River is known for its many legacies. The Babbitt Center for Land and Water Policy developed a StoryMap about the Colorado River, its tributaries, and the lands upon which communities, economies, and the environment depend. It is also about the places, people, and policies that have shaped water and land management and planning in the past and will continue to shape decisions about how we use, share, and conserve these finite resources today and in the future. With a widening gap between supply and demand, the water resources upon which land use, planning, and development depend are more vulnerable than ever.
The Babbitt Center has created an Esri ArcHub open data portal that contains the data, maps, and related reports seen or mentioned in The Hardest Working River in the West StoryMap. This allows individuals to download and explore the data for themselves.
The Lincoln Institute provides a variety of early- and mid-career fellowship opportunities for researchers. In this series, we follow up with our fellows to learn more about their work.
As the director of The Nature Conservancy’s North America Center for Resilient Conservation Science, ecologist Mark Anderson led a team of scientists in the development and mapping of TNC’s resilient and connected network: a detailed, nationwide map of linked landscapes that are uniquely suited to preserve biodiversity and withstand the impacts of climate change. In 2021, Anderson received the Kingsbury Browne Conservation Leadership Award and Fellowship, named for the Boston lawyer and former Lincoln Institute fellow whose work led to the creation of the Land Trust Alliance. In this interview, which has been condensed and edited for clarity, he explains why connected natural strongholds are critical to combating our biodiversity crisis.
JON GOREY: What is the focus of your research?
MARK ANDERSON: Conservation of land and water is extremely expensive, and it’s long term. What we’ve really been focused on is making sure we’re conserving places that are resilient to climate change—really thinking about biodiversity loss, and where are the places on the ground or in the water that we think will continue to sustain nature, even as the climate changes in ways that we can’t fully predict.
As we dove deeper and deeper into the science, the beauty of it is that the properties of land and water—the topography, the soil types, the way water moves and collects—actually build resilience into the system. When you hear about a climate disaster, for example, a drought or a flood, you kind of picture it as a big swash everywhere. But in fact, there’s all sorts of detail to how that plays out on the land, and we can actually use an understanding of that to find places that are much more resilient and places that are much more vulnerable. So the effects of that are spread in understandable and predictable ways, and that’s what we are focused on: finding those places where we think nature will retain resilience.
Climate change is very different than any other threat we’ve ever faced because it’s a change in the ambient conditions of the planet. It’s a change in the temperature and moisture regimes. And in response to that change, nature literally has to rearrange. So a big question is, how do we help nature thrive and conserve the ability of nature to rearrange? Connectivity between places where species can thrive and move is key to that.
We divided the US into about 10 regions, and in each of those regions, we had a large steering committee of scientists from every state. They reviewed it, they argued about the concepts, we tested stuff out, they tested it on the ground, and that’s what improved the quality of the work, it’s all thanks to them. By the time we finished, it took 287 scientists and 12 years, so it was a lot of work. We involved a lot of people in the work, and so there’s a lot of trust now of the dataset.
Anderson led the development of The Nature Conservancy’s Resilient Land Mapping Tool, which allows users to generate customized maps of the places in the US where species can survive and thrive in a changing climate. Credit: The Nature Conservancy.
JG: What are you working on now, and what are you interested in working on next?
MA: The US has not signed on to the global 30 by 30 agreement [to protect 30 percent of the world’s lands and oceans by 2030], but we have America the Beautiful, which the Biden Administration has launched as a 30 by 30 plan. People get hung up on that 30 percent, which is important, but if we want to sustain biodiversity, what’s really important is, which 30 percent is it? Are we representing all the ecosystems, are we reaching all the species? Are we finding places that are resilient, and are we connecting them in a way that nature can actually move and be sustained?
Our work is all about resilience and connectivity and biodiversity, and it turns out that the network we came up with, that has full representation of all the habitats and ecoregions and connectivity, turned out to be 34 percent [of the US]. So we have internally adopted it within TNC as our framework: We are trying to conserve that network, and that’s been super exciting. Because over the last five years, we conserved 1.1 million acres, of which about three quarters was directly in the network.
In 2023, The Nature Conservancy protected high-priority landscapes including Fern Lake, which spans the Kentucky-Tennessee border in the Cumberland Gap. Credit: PapaBear via iStock/Getty Images Plus.
It’s very unlikely that the federal government is going to actually do the conservation; it’s really going to be done by the private NGOs, state agencies, and land trusts. In fact, in the Northeast, private land conservation over the last 10 years surpassed all the federal and state agency conservation combined. So our strategy has been to create a tool and get the science out and just encourage people to be using the science and thinking about climate resilience—with our fingers crossed that, if this makes sense to people, wherever they are, and we’re all sort of working off that, it will conserve the network in a diffuse way.
What we’re working on now is freshwater resilience, focusing on rivers and streams and the connectivity and resilience of those systems. Our vision of a resilient system is a long, connected network with good water quality that allows fish and mussels to move around and adapt to the changing climate. But a lot of those systems are fragmented by dams, their floodplains are developed, their water quality is poor, and there’s a lot of water use, because they’re in a residential area that’s extracting all the water.
JG: What do you wish more people knew about conservation, biodiversity, and ecology?
MA: Well, two things—one good, one bad. I wish more people understood the urgency of the biodiversity crisis. The fact that we’ve lost 3 billion birds—there are 3 billion fewer birds than there were 40 years ago. Our mammals are constrained now to small fragments of their original habitats. There’s a crisis in our insects, that is really scary. Most of my career, we were focused on rare things; now these are common things that are dropping in abundance. So I wish people really understood that.
And I also wish people understood that we can turn that around, by really focusing our energy and conserving the right places, and there’s still hope and time to do that. It’s a big task, and it can only be done by thousands of organizations working on it, but it can be turned around.
River otters in Indiana’s Patoka River National Wildlife Refuge. The Nature Conservancy recently purchased 1,700 acres adjacent to the refuge, expanding the valley’s connected wildlife habitat to more than 20,000 acres. Credit: Steve Gifford via Flickr CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
JG. When it comes to your work, what keeps you up at night? And what gives you hope?
MA: Well, I’m a scientist, and there are so many potential errors and problems and data issues, they never end. So our results are not perfect. They’re pretty good, they’ve been ground tested a lot, but they’re not perfect.
The other thing is the future. I really want my kids and grandkids to have a wonderful world full of nature, and to get there, we’re going to have to really change our course.
JG. What’s the most surprising thing you’ve learned in your research?
MA: When we started this work, we didn’t have a concept of what the end was going to look like. And I probably thought of the end as a bunch of big places, you know? But it’s not a bunch of big places, it’s a net, it’s a web—a web of connected places, some big, some small. So that was a surprise to me.
JG: You work a lot with maps—what’s the coolest map you’ve ever seen?
MA: We have a concept called climate flow, which is predicting how nature will move through the landscape following unfragmented areas and climatic gradients. And one of our scientists successfully animated that map, so that you can see the movement of the flows—and that is one of the coolest maps. It’s not perfectly accurate, but it gets the concept across really nicely. And it was this map that helped us figure out that there’s a pattern to all this. It’s not random, there’s a pattern—there are places where flows concentrate, there are places where flow diffuses, and that’s really important to know.
The Nature Conservancy’s animated Migrations in Motion map shows the average direction species need to move to track hospitable climates as they shift across the landscape. Credit: Dan Majka/The Nature Conservancy.
JG: What’s the best book you’ve read lately?
MA: My favorite book recently was Wilding by Isabella Tree. It’s a nonfiction book from the British Isles, where a farming couple in Knepp, they were never able to make the area a productive farm so they decided just to stop farming it and let it go wild, and they document the change from farming to wildness. They introduce some grazing animals that would be the counterpart of the aurochs and warthogs that would have been there, and immediately, the farm becomes a total mess—lots of weeds, dug up areas, the neighbors complain. But over time, all these rare species start to show up, all these owls that have not been seen, nightingales, turtle doves, and pretty soon it is like a total biodiversity hotspot. So it’s a very interesting read, it’s very hopeful.
In the last year I’ve read several books about African American perspectives on the environmental movement, and those are powerful. One was called Black Faces, White Spaces, by Carolyn Finney, and I’m reading one now called A Darker Wilderness, and it’s really eye-opening on the equity issues that are buried in conservation.
This RFP will open for submissions on January 16, 2024.
The Consortium for Scenario Planning, a program of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, invites proposals for applications of exploratory scenario planning (XSP) processes in communities to address disaster recovery and resilience.
The consortium is looking for projects that will design community-based XSP workshops that can be used in disaster recovery and resilience planning. Applicants are not required to implement their workshop models, although they are welcome to do so. Following the project’s completion, the Lincoln Institute may select one or more projects to use as the basis for a technical assistance program, implemented the following year by Lincoln Institute staff and the project creator.
Disasters may be on a neighborhood, community-wide, or regional scale. Many specific disasters may be part of a cycle of cascading hazards, where the effects of one disaster bleed into or cause another, such as wildfires that cause catastrophic flooding, or floods that destroy homes, precipitate sanitation crises, and trigger landslides.
For this project, examples of disasters to be considered in workshops might include, but should not be limited to:
Wildfires
Floods
Severe weather events (hurricanes, tornadoes, etc.)
Earthquakes
Oil spills
Drought
RFP Schedule
Application deadline: February 16, 2024
Notification of accepted proposals: March 4, 2024
First draft: December 2025
Final draft: February 2025
Evaluation Criteria
The Lincoln Institute will evaluate proposals based on five criteria:
Relevance of the project to the RFP’s theme of exploratory scenario planning as applied to disaster recovery and resilience.
Adherence to and understanding of XSP method in proposed workshop design.
Capacity and expertise of the team and relevant analytical and/or practice-based experience.
Potential impact and usefulness of the project for practitioners of scenario planning.
Feasibility of project completion within a one-year timeframe.
Detalles
Submission Deadline
February 16, 2024 at 11:59 PM
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Palabras clave
adaptación, mitigación climática, recuperación pos-desastre, medio ambiente, gestión ambiental, planificación ambiental, planicie aluvial, la región intermontañosa del oeste, planificación de uso de suelo, Nueva Inglaterra, planificación, resiliencia, planificación de escenarios
This StoryMap features a growing library of case studies that illustrate the role of land use and policy in mitigating and adapting to climate change. Featured case studies range from the Life Vimine Project in Venice, Italy, to the Watts Rising Transformative Climate Communities Project in Los Angeles.
