The Freshwater Trust has authored a special issue of The Water Report #253: Improving Working Lands Investments: How Watershed Outcomes Banks Have Proven Successful.
Working lands are areas of land that are used for agriculture, ranching, forestry, or other productive purposes. Robust investment in working lands provides agricultural producers with valuable funds to implement practices that create the efficiency and flexibility needed to manage resources through drought, urban encroachment, labor shortages, rising input costs, and new regulatory pressures (e.g., those responding to water quality impairments). Robust investment can help farmers stay in business, better withstand macroeconomic shocks, and deliver food to American consumers more affordably. But our current conservation funding approach is inefficient, fragmented, and tangled in red tape. However, by using technology to prioritize where we invest, coordinating fragmented funding to the best projects across a region, and vastly streamlining transactions, we can convert essential government investment into critical outcomes that matter to everyone.
- Page 1: Smarter, Faster, More Efficient Working Lands Investment
- Page 3: The Watershed Outcomes Bank
- Page 5: Snake River: Watershed Outcomes Bank Case Study
- Page 11: California Pilot: “Sierra to Sea” Watershed Outcomes Bank
- Page 15: What Comes Next? Structural Policy Changes
A special thanks to The Water Report for this opportunity.
