John Farner, a leading expert on water, land use, and agriculture, has been named executive director of the Babbitt Center for Land and Water Policy. Farner will lead the Babbitt Center’s work to promote the integration of land and water management in the United States and around the world.

Farner, who joined the Babbitt Center in September, was previously global chief sustainability officer of the precision agriculture technology company Netafim. He succeeds founding director Jim Holway, who is retiring after leading the Babbitt Center since its launch by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy in 2017.

“The Babbitt Center has established itself as a thought leader at the nexus of land use planning and water management in the Colorado River Basin under Jim Holway’s leadership, with a focus on connecting and supporting the communities that steward this essential resource,” said George W. McCarthy, president of the Lincoln Institute. “John Farner brings experience and perspectives to this role that will help us deepen our roots in the region, even as we expand our knowledge base and global influence.”

Farner has spent more than 20 years promoting solutions to global environmental challenges, and has addressed the United States Congress, the United Nations, and various other national and global organizations. Before joining Netafim, he served as head of sustainability, public affairs, and strategic initiatives for the US-based Irrigation Association, where he was the chief advocate and spokesperson for the industry before national and international policymakers, as well as NGOs. At Netafim, Farner oversaw initiatives related to agriculture, water replenishment, and corporate social responsibility.

“Water is the lifeblood of the West, and the decisions we make today will have lasting impacts well into our future,” Farner said. “I’m thrilled to be joining such a talented team as we embrace the challenge of making a positive impact on our land, water, and livelihoods. The spotlight on the Colorado River Basin is growing, and the Babbitt Center has proven to be the best resource for tools and solutions that help communities secure their water future. I’m excited to build upon our efforts and expand our reach, sharing what we’ve learned with others facing similar challenges in the United States and around the world.”

Since its founding, the Babbitt Center has developed tools and best practices to support community-led management of land and water resources in the Colorado River Basin, which is dependent on one of the most heavily used and overallocated rivers in the world. It works throughout the seven Colorado River Basin states, binationally across the Basin into Mexico, and with Native American Tribes, helping communities become more resilient and building an exchange of transformative ideas with other arid and semiarid regions.

“Effective land and water management is critically important, especially as the climate changes,” McCarthy noted. “The Babbitt Center is testing innovative new methodologies and approaches for both urban and rural communities, and we’re ready to share these ideas broadly as we help build capacity and resilience in the Basin and beyond.”

Learn more about the Babbitt Center for Land and Water Policy.

Don’t miss the Mayor’s Desk book, coming this fall! 

With a population of nearly 33 million and growing, Delhi is the second-largest metropolitan area in the world after Tokyo, and on track to become number one. Shelly Oberoi, 39, was elected mayor of the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD), a governing body representing some 20 million of those people, in early 2023. Born in the capital city, Oberoi was named a vice president of the women’s wing of the anti-corruption Aam Aadmi Party before becoming a ward city councilor in 2022. Oberoi, who had to run for the mayoral post several times due to parliamentary voting challenges, promised that “Delhi will be cleaned and transformed” in her tenure. She has been an assistant professor at Delhi University and Mumbai’s Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies, and has authored several research papers on corporate social responsibility, global finance, and other topics. 

Anthony Flint: You’re the first mayor in a decade to oversee all of central city Delhi, after reunification of the Municipal Corporation of Delhi. What kind of governing challenges and opportunities come along with that?  

Shelly Oberoi: Governing the Municipal Corporation after its unification has come along with a fair share of challenges and opportunities. On one hand, centralization of powers allows for streamlined decision-making, enhanced accountability, and improved collaboration across departments. While centralization allows for more efficiency, it also requires careful planning to ensure equitable distribution of resources to address the diverse needs of different areas within Delhi. Balancing these needs and optimizing resource allocation is a significant challenge that we are addressing at the moment. On the other hand, unification has also offered us an opportunity for policy alignment. With a unified municipal corporation, we can now align policies and regulations across all areas of Delhi. Policy alignment allows us to address issues such as education, property tax, and new initiatives in a coordinated manner, leading to more effective civil planning and development across the city. This enables consistent implementation of rules and regulations, creating a level playing field and ensuring fairness and transparency in governance.  

AF: You said upon being elected that you would work “to make Delhi the city that it should have been”—what does that vision look like, and what are the biggest obstacles to achieving it? 

SO: My vision for Delhi is based upon the Aam Aadmi Party’s 10 guarantees, as announced by our National Convenor and Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal. These guarantees reflect the aspirations of the people and prioritize the overall well-being of the city. We have envisioned a clean and beautiful Delhi, free from the blight of landfills, where waste management systems are streamlined and cleanliness is promoted throughout the city. We are establishing a culture of transparency and accountability, ensuring a corruption-free Municipal Corporation of Delhi. Our vision also includes providing a permanent solution to the problem of parking through efficient management systems and addressing the issue of stray animals with compassionate and sustainable measures. Moreover, we aim to have well-maintained roads that prioritize safety and smooth traffic flow, improving the overall commuting experience for residents.  

The work of the Aam Aadmi Party’s state government in Delhi is already talked about globally, particularly in the fields of education and healthcare. Chief Minister Kejriwal has administered revolutions in the landscape of India’s public education and public health sectors. People have started believing that government facilities can be trusted, that they can offer them the equal standard of services for free that private facilities do at exorbitant prices. 

Building on this momentum, we are working with a special focus on transforming schools and hospitals into centers of excellence. We are also enhancing parks across the city, creating green spaces for citizens to enjoy. In a welcome change, we are ensuring regular salaries for workers and offering them a better environment within the MCD to promote job security and build a motivated workforce. Simplifying the process of obtaining licenses for traders, creating a welcoming business environment, and establishing designated vending zones for street vendors are also part of our vision.  

However, we acknowledge the challenges posed by rapid urbanization, budgetary constraints, stakeholder engagement, and coordination among different agencies. By recognizing these challenges and proactively addressing them, we can work toward making Delhi the city it should have always been—a thriving, inclusive, and sustainable metropolis that residents can be proud to call home and, above all, the number-one capital of the world. 

AF: Regarding air quality—brought to international attention by such documentary films as All That Breathes—what are some short-term solutions? Please also comment on your approach regarding garbage and landfills. The two issues are related, in that the new waste-to-energy plant will seemingly help solve one problem while further contributing to air pollution. 

SO: Air quality is indeed a pressing concern for Delhi, and addressing it requires a multi-faceted approach that incorporates both short-term and long-term solutions. However, air doesn’t belong to any one geographical boundary; a lot of factors that arise in our neighboring states adversely impact Delhi. Thus, the challenge needs a concerted and coordinated approach from all stakeholders, including the central government and neighboring state governments.  

The Delhi government is leading an extensive effort to reduce air pollution through its Summer and Winter Action Plans. The government accordingly decides upon short- and long-term solutions as part of these action plans, be it stopping dust pollution and industrial pollution, improving on solid waste management, or conducting real-time source apportionment studies. Under these action plans, the MCD has been delegated the responsibility of keeping a check on the factors under its domain and maintaining vigils on smaller roads under its domain. The state government regularly convenes review meetings and the MCD has extended its unconditional support to help with these efforts. It is important to also note that due to these efforts, the air pollution levels in Delhi have already seen a welcome change.  

As for garbage and landfills, we are actively working upon improving the city’s solid waste management system by means of promoting waste segregation, installing fixed-compactor transfer stations, and shutting down neighborhood garbage dump yards. We have also set a plan to eliminate the three garbage landfills of the city. Of this we are on track to completely clear off the Okhla landfill by the end of this year and the Bhalswa landfill by the first half of next year. These targets have been set by the state as part of a dedicated approach to clean the city, and Chief Minister Kejriwal has been monitoring the daily progress to further strengthen MCD’s resolve toward this mission. 

AF: Are there any policies in the works to address the city’s notorious traffic congestion? How does that fit in with your overall plan to enhance infrastructure and make the city more resilient? 

SO: Traffic is mostly beyond the domain of the MCD. In Delhi, the municipal body only looks after minor roads and neighborhood lanes, whose upkeep we are working upon with utmost commitment ever since taking over the reins. Along with the help of our councilors and local citizens, we are identifying all such roads and lanes that need any sort of repair and ensuring that the task is dealt with. At the larger level, the Delhi Government’s Public Works Department and Transport Department are doing a great job of reducing traffic congestion in the city by upgrading the existing infrastructure, building new flyovers and underpasses, and introducing electric buses. 

AF: The Delhi metro area—with a population of nearly 33 million and growing by nearly 3 percent per year—seems to warrant a more centralized form of governance. Is there any chance of reform to allow mayors in India to manage their cities as leaders do in major cities in other parts of the world? 

SO: In principle, I do recognize the need for reforms that empower city leaders to effectively manage their cities, similar to the governance models observed in major cities around the world. However, the current governance structure in India has its limitations that we respect, and we prefer to mull about within our own landscape. In theory there is always a chance for reform and exploration of alternative models. We can explore enhancing the capacity of mayors and local authorities through training programs, knowledge sharing, and collaboration with international city management institutions that can equip them with the necessary skills and expertise to effectively lead and manage their cities. We can also promote collaborative governance models that involve active participation of citizens, civil society organizations, and other stakeholders to facilitate better decision-making and ensure that the diverse interests and concerns of the city’s residents are adequately represented. 

Anthony Flint is a senior fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, contributing editor to Land Lines, and host of the Land Matters podcast. 

Lead image: Leaders are working to improve air quality and clear landfills in Delhi, which is on track to become the world’s largest metropolitan area. Credit: PRABHASROY via iStock Editorial/Getty Images Plus.

Climate change is no longer knocking—it kicked down the door this summer. Wildfires destroyed more than 33 million acres of forest in Canada’s worst-ever fire season. Vermont was flooded by a 100-year storm for the second time in 12 years, while a different deluge left five dead outside of Philadelphia. Temperatures in Phoenix crested 110ºF for 31 consecutive days, failing to dip below 90ºF at any time for more than two straight weeks. And as deadly bouts of flood, fire, and ferocious heat erupted all over the planet, we lived through the hottest day in recorded history—a global record that was promptly broken the very next day, and again the next—in what scientists say was likely the hottest month on Earth in 120,000 years.    

Given the urgency of the climate crisis, every workable solution to limit further warming and to transition our economies off of fossil fuels deserves exploration. This dire situation demands technological advances, of course; indeed, technology has alleviated so much human suffering, it’s tempting to heave all our hopes squarely upon its back, like desperate sports fans expectantly looking to their team’s star player to pull off just one more spectacular play as the clock runs out.  

But we can’t overlook the importance of allowing and encouraging nature to heal its own ecosystems as part of our climate strategy. And nature’s toolbox can be surprisingly effective. 

Trees are often touted for the many small miracles they provide, especially in urban areas, as they cool streets, clean air, and reduce storm runoff while pulling carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. But how many people know that microscopic forest fungi process twice as much carbon as the United States emits each year? Or that a salt marsh can sequester 10 times as much carbon per acre as a forest? Or that restoring even a small fraction of bison populations across parts of the American prairie could help those grasslands absorb more carbon than all of Great Britain emits in a year?  

These are not miracle cures for the climate crisis, of course; none of these tools will slow climate change on its own without a dramatic reduction of fossil fuel use. But all are surprisingly powerful, relatively simple, and low-risk strategies we could be using more often, in more places. After all, both an expensive cordless drill and a five-dollar screwdriver can help you build something—but only if you get to work using them.  

Marsh Magic 

Hundreds of millions of people around the world live near a salt marsh, or a similar coastal ecosystem of mangroves or seagrass. These seaside sanctuaries offer quiet beauty and attract abundant wildlife; they also absorb flood water and wave energy during storms, reducing damage to adjacent communities by up to 20 percent. But many people don’t realize that these unassuming tidal wetlands are also busy trapping carbon at an astonishing rate—10 to 40 times faster than a forest.   

There are two reasons salt marshes, mangroves, and seagrass beds are such powerful carbon sinks. One is that their vegetation grows very quickly, says Hilary Stevens, coastal resilience manager at Restore America’s Estuaries. “There’s a lot of photosynthesis, a lot of pulling of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere,” she explains. 

But the real magic of the marsh is its salty, soggy soil. When that vegetation dies, it falls to the bottom of the marsh and gets buried in a network of roots and sediment, where it will remain indefinitely saturated with briny water. That anaerobic environment slows or even stops the decomposition process, allowing the carbon in the plants to stay stashed in the soil for hundreds or even thousands of years. This underwater vault is known as “blue carbon.” 

While forests are also excellent at trapping carbon, Stevens says, they’re more likely to release it, through events ranging from wildfire to decomposition. But the carbon in marsh soil “can remain there for centuries if that area remains inundated and undisturbed.”  

Of course, that’s a big “if” when there are humans around. The United States alone loses an estimated 80,000 acres of coastal wetlands each year due to a combination of development and sea level rise. Even many surviving marshes have been ditched and drained over the years, allowing air to reach the long-submerged soil, and turning powerful carbon sinks into leaky CO2 emitters.   

“If you disturb an inundated soil, if you allow it to drain—whether that’s because you filled it, ditched it, diked it, drained it, converted it to agriculture, or paved it and put up a parking lot—all of that organic material is at risk of being rereleased into the atmosphere,” Stevens says. Centuries worth of carbon can then escape fairly quickly, so preventing further loss of healthy coastal wetlands is critical from a climate standpoint.  

That’s a growing challenge as ocean levels rise more quickly. Salt marshes can sometimes migrate upland as rising seas encroach, says Cynthia Dittbrenner, director of coastal and natural resources at Massachusetts-based conservation organization The Trustees—but only if there’s room to do so, and the walls and roads of human development often make that impossible. And although they’re actually quite good at adapting to slowly rising seas—because a healthy salt marsh naturally builds in elevation each year as its grasses die off and accumulate on the bottom and daily tidal inflows deliver new sediment—scientists fear that natural process of accretion can’t keep up with the unnatural and accelerating rate of sea level rise driven by human-caused climate change. 

What’s more, a lot of our remaining marshes aren’t particularly healthy.  

In New England, for example, colonial farmers viewed salt marshes as a source of hay for livestock and horses, and set about draining them to ease harvesting. To this day, most of the region’s marshes are still ribboned with man-made ditches dug hundreds of years ago. Later, the long-neglected ditches clogged, creating pools of standing water that prompted 20th-century mosquito-prevention squads to dig them out once again. But a drained marsh doesn’t build elevation as it should; in fact, it sinks, because the organic matter in the soil starts decomposing more rapidly as it interacts with the air.  

“A legacy of 300 years of us ditching the marsh has led to lowering the water table, and that marsh soil is now being exposed to oxygen,” Dittbrenner says. “It’s aerated, it’s decomposing quickly, and it’s actually sinking . . . so we have to heal the hydrology to fix that natural process.”  

There are simple and cost-effective ways to restore ditch-drained salt marshes. One method, piloted by the US Fish and Wildlife Service, is to cut marsh grass along the edge of a ditch, rake the hay into the trench, and secure it to the bottom with twine and stakes. “When the tides come in, that hay slows the water down and encourages sediment to drop out,” Dittbrenner says, and that slowly refills the ditch. “If you do that over a series of three to four years, you’ve filled the ditch up, and now it can grow salt marsh hay,” and tidewater lingers longer as it naturally would.  

The Trustees implemented that technique on 85 acres in the Great Marsh north of Boston, and the results were so promising that the organization secured funding—and hard-won permits—to expand the restoration effort across all of the 1,400 acres it manages there.  

Another opportunity for marsh restoration is in places where a road or bridge has cut off part of a marsh from incoming seawater. “The area upstream of that essentially becomes freshwater, because it’s not getting enough tidal influence,” Stevens says. Soil inundated with freshwater is still slow to release carbon dioxide, she notes, but it does emit a lot of methane—a much more potent greenhouse gas—because it hosts a different set of microbes not found in brackish or saltwater. “If you can restore tidal flow to those areas, there’s a massive carbon benefit to that.”   

One such effort underway is the Herring River Restoration Project in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, where a dike built in 1909 cut off tidal flow to what had been a stable estuary for 2,000 years. A new bridge with large tide gates will allow ocean water to return—gradually, at first—along with herring and other fish, tidal sediment, and native saltwater seagrasses. The project will return 677 acres of freshwater wetland to salt marsh, which the US Geological Survey calculates will reduce emissions by an equivalent of nearly 3,000 tons of carbon per year.  

With less room to migrate, smaller, narrow “fringe” marshes are more at risk from rising seas. But they can “attenuate quite a bit of wave energy,” Dittbrenner says, making them useful storm defenses for coastal communities, and they can be protected—or even created—with simple, natural methods. Installing coir logs (made of coconut husk fiber) or mesh bags stuffed with oyster shells a few meters offshore, for example, can help protect and grow the marsh behind it. “It slows the wave energy so much that it allows sediment to build up,” she says, until grass can grow on it. In one project, Dittbrenner says, researchers were able to extend a stretch of fringe marsh 10 feet further into the water in less than a year using old lobster traps to slow the waves and capture sediment.  

Stevens is now working on a project in the Gulf Coast that uses recycled oyster shells from restaurants to build artificial reefs, creating new habitat for live oysters. In addition to increasing food security for the community (oysters, she notes, are one of the most climate-friendly ways to grow protein, requiring no irrigation, fertilizer, or feed), the reefs create a breakwater to stabilize the shoreline and protect adjacent communities.  

But halting the continued loss of coastal wetlands would have the biggest climate impact of all. “We would love to see better protection for existing blue carbon ecosystems,” Stevens says, along with a more coordinated government approach—two pillars of Restore America’s Estuaries’ Blue Carbon National Action Plan.  

At the same time, Stevens says, there’s a need for permitting reform, so groups like RAE and The Trustees can more easily restore degraded marshes; it can be difficult to reuse dredged sediment, for example, even though it’s a key ingredient to help sinking marshes. “Some of those regulations, because of the way they’re worded, actually inhibit restoration, because they make it so difficult to operate in the coastal zone,” she says. Such rules were put in place with the best of intentions, she adds, but that was decades ago. “And we’ve learned a lot since then.”  

Forest-Feeding Fungi 

Neither plant nor animal (though more closely related to the latter), fungi are their own biological kingdom, comprising about 3.5 million different species. Microscopic fungi are everywhere—all over our bodies, on plants, in the air we breathe—and without them, says Jennifer Bhatnagar, associate professor of biology at Boston University, most of the biological processes on earth would cease. They’re especially important in forests.  

“One of the main roles of those fungi in forests is to decompose dead plant leaves, roots, and other plant parts, and other dead microorganisms, and most of that activity happens in the soil,” she says. In doing so, they release elements like nitrogen, phosphorus, and sulfur back into the soil in a form that plants can use.  

But there’s a group that’s particularly crucial to forest health: mycorrhizal fungi, which live on the roots of plants in one of the oldest symbiotic relationships found in nature.  

When a mycorrhizal fungus colonizes a plant by growing on or inside of its root cells, the plant will send up to 30 percent of its carbon—in the form of sugar, produced through photosynthesis—from its leaves down to its roots to feed the fungus. To return the favor, “the fungus will use that carbon to extend out into the soil and absorb those nutrients that are being decomposed by other fungi,” Bhatnagar says, and give them to the plant. The carbon ends up feeding not just the fungus, but also nearby microbes, which help sequester it in the soil.  

“This is the main way that plant carbon gets from above ground to below ground on the surface of the earth,” Bhatnagar says. “It’s a really important way that we’re able to take carbon out of the atmosphere and put it into the earth—and it can remain there for quite a long time.”  

A study published in June estimated that an astounding 13.12 gigatons of carbon fixed by plants each year is allocated to mycorrhizal fungi, at least temporarily. It’s not yet known how much of that carbon is retained in the soil long-term, but even half of that would represent more than the annual carbon-equivalent emissions of the United States—and the researchers suggested that fungi could be essential to reaching net zero.   

Mycorrhizal fungi networks can help boost a forest’s carbon intake above ground as well. Ecologist Colin Averill, lead scientist at ​​ETH Zurich’s Crowther Lab and the founder of the carbon removal start-up Funga, says it’s helpful to think about the microbial environment of soil the way we conceive of the human gut biome. “Each of us has this incredibly biodiverse community of bacteria in our gut, and this has profound implications for our health,” Averill says—and a forest is no different.  

To learn what a healthy forest microbiome looks like, he and his team compared soil samples from hundreds of locations across Europe where foresters had been tracking trees for decades. They found that the mix of fungi living on the tree roots in the sampled forests was linked to a threefold variation in how fast the trees grew. Put another way, Averill says, “You could have two pine forests in Central Europe sitting side by side, experiencing the same climate, growing in the same soils. But if one of them has the right community of fungi on its roots, it can be growing up to three times as fast as that adjacent forest,” and removing more carbon from the atmosphere. 

This can have a particularly profound impact on the reforestation of former agricultural land or other degraded landscapes, where, after decades of farming, grazing, or mining, Averill says, “The microbes that live in that soil no longer look anything like the microbes in a forest.”  

Averill partnered with a nonprofit in Wales that was reforesting an abandoned sheep pasture to conduct an experiment, adding a handful of soil from a healthy forest to some of the saplings as they were planted. “It’s a very low-tech procedure,” he says. “But it’s not just any dirt. It’s dirt from a forest that our analyses identified as harboring intact wild, biodiverse, high-performing fungal communities. And the early results there show we can accelerate forest regeneration by 30 to 70 percent if we co-reintroduce the below-ground microbiology.”   

Similar experiments around the world that introduced healthy microbial networks to degraded forest or grassland soil have shown a 64 percent average increase in biomass growth, Averill says—though the results vary widely. “Some places are unresponsive, some are incredibly responsive,” he says. “But basically what we’re learning is that there’s something special about wild microbiology that can be lost, and it can have this enormous effect if you reintroduce it.”  

Letting Wildlife Go Wild 

For another way to accelerate forest growth and carbon uptake, we turn to a different biological kingdom: animalia.

A 2023 study led by Yale ecology professor Oswald J. Schmitz found that protecting and restoring populations of animal species can supercharge the carbon capture capabilities of their respective ecosystems. This can enhance the total amount of CO2 naturally absorbed and stored by as much as 6.41 gigatons per year worldwide—or more than 14 trillion pounds of CO2. 

“People assume that because animals are rare in ecosystems, they don’t matter to ecosystem functioning,” Schmitz says. But the idea of “trophic cascades”—in which predators, by preying on herbivores, have a ripple effect on vegetation—made him think otherwise. “If predators can have a profound effect on plants, and we know herbivores can have a profound effect on plants, then surely they should also have an effect on carbon cycling and nutrient cycling.”  

They do, and the carbon impact of healthy wildlife populations can be tremendous in all kinds of ecosystems. 

Endangered forest elephants in central Africa, for example, spread the seeds of trees and woody plants, and trample and devour vegetative undergrowth, helping carbon-dense overstory trees grow faster and bigger. Restoring wild elephant populations within the region’s 79 national parks and protected areas—about 537,000 square kilometers of tropical rainforest—could help capture an estimated 13 megatons of additional CO2 per year, or 13 million metric tons.  

In the ocean, migrating marine fish eat algae near the surface, and their fecal matter drops to the ocean floor or nourishes photosynthesizing phytoplankton. Fish also help the ocean lock up carbon as they rid their bodies of excess salt through the production of calcite, a form of calcium carbonate. “Calcite is a way of binding up salt,” Schmitz says, “but it’s also a carbon-based unit.” The hard pellets sink to the ocean bottom, and don’t break down easily. Marine fish currently help the oceans absorb 5.5 gigatons of CO2 annually—without getting explicit credit for it—and Schmitz says overharvesting fish or catching them in deeper waters could jeopardize that enormous underwater carbon vault.  

Predators like sea otters, meanwhile, help carbon-absorbent kelp forests thrive by keeping seaweed-munching sea urchins in check. Gray wolves and sharks create similar trophic cascades in boreal forests and coral reefs, where they keep the populations of their smaller herbaceous prey in balance.

In the arctic, organic matter in the ground doesn’t decay and release methane as long as the permafrost stays frozen. Caribou and muskoxen help ensure that by trampling arctic snowpack, creating a cold crust of compressed snow that forms an insulative barrier over the permafrost. Meanwhile, just by eating and trampling shrubs, they help the snow reflect more solar radiation. “If the animals aren’t there, the shrubs grow above the snowpack level, the sun shines on the vegetation and, especially in the spring, that vegetation holds the solar radiation,” Schmitz says. “It doesn’t reflect it the way snow would, and it warms up the soil a lot faster.”  

And in North America, where white settlers all but wiped out the more than 30 million bison that once roamed the prairies, just 2 percent of that animal’s one-time numbers remain, confined to about 1 percent of its historical range. Because heavy herds of grazing bison help grasslands retain carbon in the soil, restoring their numbers across even a small fraction of the landscape—less than 16 percent of a handful of prairies where human conflict would be minimal—could help those ecosystems store an additional 595 megatons of CO2 annually, the study found.  

That’s more than 10 percent of all the CO2 emitted by the United States in 2021. “We could restore up to 2 million bison in parts of the prairie states where they’re going to have very little conflict with people, and in doing that, you will be able to take up enough carbon to offset all of the prairie states’ fossil fuel emissions,” Schmitz explains.  

These findings could have a meaningful impact on land and marine conservation efforts, says Jim Levitt, director of the International Land Conservation Network (ILCN) at the Lincoln Institute. “This is not your everyday piece of natural climate solution research,” says Levitt, who was not involved in the study. “I think this is a major insight.”  

For one thing, it points to the need for larger, more interconnected wild spaces. “It’s not just land protection, it’s also stewardship across big corridors, large landscape conservation,” Levitt says. Animals need huge swaths of functionally intact ecosystems to recover their historical numbers and species diversity, but they can rebound rapidly given the right conditions.  

“If you give nature a chance to reestablish itself, it’s really efficient at doing so,” Levitt says, noting that many US National Forests were once abandoned lands denuded of their timber. Now those swaths of forest are essential tools for absorbing atmospheric carbon.  

“Not only do the trees sequester carbon, but the soil, the animals, the insect life, and the mycorrhizal networks under the ground, they’re all sequestering carbon, and they all depend on a healthy chain of trophic networks,” Levitt says. “So there is utility, even related to the survival of our species, in having wild animals on open space. It’s not just beautiful, it keeps the carbon cycle in tune.” 

As a resource hub connecting private and civic conservation groups across cultural and political boundaries, Levitt says ILCN has an important role to play in supporting the establishment of the type of linked, protected environments that promote greater biodiversity. “You really need large, interconnected, protected spaces to get to truly rich ecosystems,” he says. “And what networks can do is make land conservation contagious sociologically—meaning, if your next-door neighbor has conserved his property, you’re more likely to do the same thing.” ILCN also supports the global 30×30 effort, an agreement among more than 190 countries to work toward protecting 30 percent of the world’s land and oceans by 2030. 

With that ambitious global conservation goal in mind, Schmitz contends that the recent study demands a shift in perspective, and an embrace of more dynamic landscapes. “We can’t just do it in parks and protected areas, there just isn’t enough [protected space],” Schmitz says. “So we actually have to think about working landscapes.”  

And that’s where human-wildlife conflict can occur, as wild animals trample crops, for example. To ease that tension, Schmitz suggests paying landowners for lost livelihoods as well as for the carbon they’re offsetting. “If we’re going to ask people to live with these animals, we should at least compensate them . . . but also we should inspire them to think differently about being stewards of their lands,” he adds. “Instead of having cattle ranchers in the western prairies, maybe there are some people who’d think of themselves better as carbon ranchers, who are willing to bring bison back, and we should actually pay them for the service that provides.” 

Jon Gorey is a staff writer for the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. 

Lead image: Coastal salt marsh in Virginia. Credit: McKinneMike via iStock/Getty Images Plus.

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.

While pursuing her doctorate at the University of Arizona, Neha Gupta participated in the Babbitt Center’s Dissertation Fellowship Program, which assists PhD students whose research focuses on integrating land and water policy to advance water sustainability and resilience. Gupta is now a joint assistant research professor of hydrology and atmospheric sciences at the University of Arizona. We caught up with her to talk about climate change, urban stormwater innovations, and her favorite cli-fi novels; this interview has been edited for length and clarity.

JON GOREY: What is the focus of your work, and how did your fellowship help advance that research?

NEHA GUPTA: A lot of my work is focused on urban hydrology, the use of stormwater as a resource, especially in arid regions, and collaborative approaches to water resource planning. I received the fellowship at the beginning of 2020—as we know, a very chaotic time in global history—so not only did it help me get across the finish line with my dissertation, but it gave me some stability in that time as well. Since then, I’ve engaged with people at the Babbitt Center and am working a little more closely with them; I got involved with being a small-group facilitator for some of the exploratory scenario planning work that they’re doing with workshops in Cochise County, and I point to the center as a place the students I’m working with and mentoring might want to partner with or eventually work for.

JG: What are you working on now, and what are you interested in working on next?

NG: I’m especially focused on green stormwater infrastructure. I’m involved in a lot of collaborative projects with the City of Tucson, the Pima County Flood Control District, and other water managers across the state. I’m also working on a statewide water reliability planning effort with the Department of Water Resources. So I’m helping manage that project at a high level, and also specifically looking at opportunities to use stormwater to recharge groundwater and support water resource needs in Arizona as things start to look a bit tighter across the Colorado River Basin.

In Tucson, we have a program called Storm to Shade that’s focused on maximizing green infrastructure, with a community outreach component and a maintenance and monitoring component. That program involves a couple of different agencies, and I work a lot with them. So it’s not just myself working in urban hydrology, but we have other people in the university thinking about it from a social, community-based perspective with an equity lens, we have landscape architects, and we all try to knit our work together . . . because stormwater really sits at the intersection of landscape architecture, urban planning, hydrology, soil health, equity, and more socially based components and perspectives.

JG: A tropical storm just dropped months’ worth of rain on Southern California in a few hours. Is that the kind of situation where some of that extreme rainfall could be collected, or is that more of a disaster than an opportunity?

NG: We’re trying to make it both. That’s exactly the kind of work that we’re trying to focus on. When we do get these bigger storms, a lot of that water is considered a threat to property. But that’s excess water that can be harnessed and used to support plants, which can then help address the urban heat island effect, and can create microclimate benefits in different areas of the state. They call it urban enhanced runoff, and that can be used for groundwater recharge projects. It’s really about treating water in a more holistic sense. And thinking about equity across an urban region, the wealthier areas tend to have more canopy and lower temperatures. So capturing urban stormwater is a resources benefit, but it can address a whole other slew of issues.

JG: When it comes to your work, what keeps you up at night? And what gives you hope?

NG: There isn’t a lot that keeps me up at night. We know that we live in a water-stressed region. It’s been this way for a long time, and it’s really about having creative ways to move water around to meet various water demands. We know that we live in an area that’s getting hotter. We know that we live in an area that’s going to be experiencing more unpredictable precipitation, whether it’s record-breaking dry years or record-breaking wet years. So I think to stay in this space in the long run, you can’t let those things keep you up at night. Otherwise you won’t get any sleep to show up the next day.

I think the hardest part, or maybe the thing that does keep me up at night, is the heat and the temperatures. Those probably cause the most immediate threat to life. But that’s why we’re focusing on ways to increase and support the urban canopy.

I’m very much a solutions-focused person, and we know these problems are not new. They’re just getting bigger and more pressing and unpredictable. But there are a lot of things we can do to address them. It really requires us working collaboratively.

JG: What’s the best book you’ve read lately?

NG: I am a pretty big fan of the “cli-fi” or climate fiction genre. On the more hopeful end, The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson is a great exercise in thinking about not only some of the terrible things that might happen as a result of climate change—and while this book came out a few years ago, we see some of these things showing up in the news now; the first chapter starts out with a heat wave in India that’s above the wet bulb temperature that humans can survive in—but also a lot of different environmental strategies. A book I recently finished that is on the more concerning end, but that I really enjoyed—it read like a movie—was called The Displacements by Bruce Holsinger. In that book, a Category 6 hurricane hits Miami, and essentially wipes it off the map. He really links together a lot of our existing societal struggles, but in the context of natural disasters that are amplified by climate change. So they’re kind of two sides of the genre—one’s a little more hopeful, the other a little more concerning—but I think they help seed the imagination and help us look a few steps out and wrap our heads around an overall slow-moving crisis that shows its face most visibly in natural disasters. I really appreciate a good story—but a story that can also help me with my own work and wrapping my head around the bigger picture.

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Jon Gorey is a staff writer at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Image: University of Arizona Assistant Research Professor and former Babbitt Fellow Neha Gupta. Credit: Courtesy photo.