Charting the Course: Eight Steps to a Healthier Bay Area
1. Include everyone. The Conservation Lands Network can be used by anyone with a computer who wants to help protect open space, wildlife, and ways of life. Incorporate Explorer into your planning efforts or funding proposals. Use the GIS data in your plans. Share the Conservation Lands Network story with a Powerpoint presentation with your colleagues, Board, and funders. And connect with the Bay Area Open Space Council to stay in the loop.
2. Create incentives. In these cash-strapped budgetary times, create incentives for ranchers, farmers, and forestland owners that will stabilize land tenure and improve the habitat and the economic viability of working lands.
3. Continue funding what already works. Find ways to provide consistent sources of private and public funding for land conservation and stewardship similar to the San Francisco Bay Area Conservancy Program, Williamson Act, private landowner incentive programs, conservation easements, mitigation monies, and the Land and Water Conservation Fund.
4. Encourage an era of New Neighboring. Use the Conservation Lands Network to help neighbors partner with neighbors by linking management actions across property lines. Help connections grow informally and formally in ways that promote community-based conservation.
5. Integrate into public plans. Concentrate development in places that keep essential habitat out of harm’s way by including the Conservation Lands Network in General Plans, the Sustainable Community Strategy and Habitat Conservation Plans, as well as other land use, watershed and transportation planning efforts.
6. Freshwater first! Protect every drop by preserving and restoring sensitive watershed lands and streams. Promote active, ongoing stewardship and protection. These areas will provide both movement corridors and refuge for plants and animals confronting a changing climate.
7. Adapt and evolve. Help public and private landowners create long-term, adaptive management plans that will build on and sustain the network. Create new initiatives within the Conservation Lands Network, such as the upcoming Bay Area Critical Linkages Project, that strengthen and deepen ongoing conservation opportunities.
8. Think Big. Connect More. Find creative ways to protect essential lands and water such as efforts like the Living Landscape Initiative and the America’s Great Outdoors initiative.
Click here to download the press release (PDF) and click here for Powerpoint slides. Spread the word.
