The Nature Conservancy: Finding a Sustainable Bottom Line in Nature
The world's largest conservation non-governmental organization is a 63-year-old environmental activist group that has drawn 119 million acres of sensitive lands under its protective wings. It has amassed assets of $6 billion and now annually collects $500 million in donations from its one million members to fight the green fight.
The Nature Conservancy has 3,500 employees, 600 of them scientists, including 380 water-resource professionals with advanced degrees. Over the past several years, under the leadership of Mark Tercek, the president and chairman who came on board in 2008, it has expanded its strategy from acquiring and sequestering environmentally important land to identifying and influencing new development projects that have potential to impact freshwater resources. It now partners with planners and developers on selected projects to optimize outcomes for both humans and nature.
These days, TNC staffers are more likely to show up on wetlands and waterway projects as scientists, engineering consultants, and planning and funding partners, rather than as spoilers to derail development.
"The organization had been evolving in that [new]direction before I got here, but that view is what attracted me to the role," Tercek tells ENR.
Tercek, a former investment banker, seems an improbable choice to run a conservation group. But he has come to see a business advantage in sustainability, as he explains in his recent book, "Nature's Fortune: How Business and Society Thrive by Investing in Nature," co-authored with Jonathan S. Adams.
Before taking the helm at TNC, he was at Goldman Sachs, where he analyzed sustainability for investment opportunities. He saw that companies that improved their environmental behavior delivered two benefits: good commercial results and good environmental outcomes. Sustainability is good business, he concluded. With that, he found a new mission.
"The work of conservation is, ultimately, working with others to ensure the vital services nature provides remain available to future generations," Tercek says. He notes that, with the global population expected to rise to 9 billion in 2050 from 6.6 billion today, sequestering lands from development is no longer enough.
Tercek says we simply have to rethink our relationship with nature because the "services" nature provides—clean air and water, pollination and a stable climate—are the basic underpinning of our quality of life, prosperity and economies. "We have to feed and sustain people without damaging the natural systems we all rely on. By helping people understand how closely tied their well-being is to the health of the natural systems, we hope we can help them understand that nature is a smart investment," Tercek says.
TNC has chapters in every state and is consulting on development programs affecting watersheds in 35 countries. It has project partners almost everywhere.
Starting in 2000, it began signing what has become a series of memoranda of understanding to develop partnerships with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, first at the national level and then at division and district levels all around the country.
According to the MOUs, the Corps benefits from TNC's "extensive and active network of conservation partnerships, biological expertise, presence and successful history of work in hundreds of local communities" and from "its position as a leading conservation organization known for its use of sound science and collaborative approaches in resolving natural-resource management issues."
TNC benefits from the Army's large, geographically dispersed, multidisciplinary staff, and the Corps' extensive experience with water-resource projects, including projects for environmental restoration and protection and development or modification of decision-support models for evaluating management options. The MOUs include no funding or competitive advantages for TNC, but they do endorse partnering from the top of the Corps' chain of command.
The regional memoranda are tailored to address regional issues, ranging from the loss of seabed habitat for oysters and grasses in the Chesapeake Bay and off Long Island to floodplain management and the operation of locks and dams and inland navigation systems across the Midwest to dam removal and ecosystem restoration nationwide.
TNC's chapter-based scientists and specialists become participants in project planning and execution who influence design and operation of projects likely to impact freshwater resources. TNC's goal is to help find the optimal balance between serving human needs and protecting nature, says Tercek.
Within some forums, TNC's participation has evolved to that of mediator and honest broker, says Tercek. "Because we are science-driven, we are often in a position to play that role," he says.
In the Colorado River basin, TNC is leading several regional forums to develop solutions to water shortages. It helped launch the Water Bank Work Group, which is exploring use of market mechanisms to move water around in times of shortage. It now facilitates the group while also serving as a member, scientific adviser and liaison to the agricultural community. "We have evolved in our role with this group to broker a dialogue among municipal water suppliers, large water districts, native American tribes and agricultural interests," Tercek says, "[We are] helping group members identify shared interests and develop creative, practical solutions."
TNC also helped broker, through its outside counsel, a binational agreement, signed in 2012, that is the first-ever international accord to allocate water not only for human uses but also for the environment. The pact between Mexico and the U.S. provides an integrated, cooperative approach to water management, including sharing surpluses and shortages. "We will continue to play the role of honest broker and mediator in negotiations to extend this agreement indefinitely," Tercek says.
TNC's water infrastructure director is Robert Sinkler, a retired Corps of Engineers colonel. His previous mission was the construction of a $14.6-billion ring of flood defenses around New Orleans, after which he served as the Corps' national environmental programs chief until his retirement last year.
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Sinkler says he answered an ad and was hired by the TNC almost immediately after leaving the Corps. He says his position is new, established as TNC's North American priority. "There was a realization in TNC that it cannot have the influence and make the kind of difference we need just by focusing on land and water easement and conservation practice," Sinkler says.
TNC had to get more active in sustaining development and water infrastructure because economic development will occur, says Sinkler. "It's just a practical, realistic way of looking at things," he adds. "You cannot achieve a lot of collective goals that we all have by just partitioning off some lands for development and other lands for conservation."
He aims to partner TNC with other organizations and double national investment in water infrastructure by 2020. "We clearly are going to have to figure out how to do that, but ... I think it's doable," Sinkler says.
He says it is not all about building, though. In many cases, significant gains can be made by managing resources more wisely, he says. One TNC initiative he cites consists of launching studies and developing proposals for revising rules written more than a half-century ago for maintaining and operating navigation and flood-control structures on major river systems. Termed "reoperating," one of its goals is to take a fresh look at the long-term effects of maintaining water depths within tight, consistent ranges to facilitate navigation, which has robbed rivers of water-level fluctuation cycles, natural habitat and flood resilience.
"Sometimes, when the federal government doesn't have the resources to investigate reoperation of original structures, TNC has been able to step in to conduct studies and open discussions," Sinkler says.
"It is a science-based organization [that is] not driven as much by passion and emotion as by good science and thought. It has credibility and legitimacy in helping bring people together," Sinkler says.
TNC is finding that, in some cases, small, well-timed modifications of operations and restoration of floodplains' natural habitat can make for big improvements in ecosystem health, flood management, hydroelectric generation capacity and drinking-water and recreational water availability. "We are smarter than we were 70 or 80 years ago," Sinkler says. "Water is not the enemy."
"We don't engage on every environmental issue," Tercek notes, "but we pick issues critical to our mission and where we think we can make a real difference." For example, TNC was "very engaged" with the recently passed Water Resources Reform and Development Act, which authorizes programs for the Corps. "We were focused on trying to make sure nature is not only protected but, more importantly, that nature is considered as a critical way in how we meet our water-resource needs," he adds.
TNC involvement often begins by invitation, but it also initiates efforts on projects, policy or planning that it sees as strategically or regionally important. The group works with consulting firms, private landowners, government agencies and universities as well as companies interested in improving corporate sustainability. It builds collaborative efforts and teams, Tercek says, "so we can use our organization's expertise and resources to help get very big work done at a large scale."
TNC relies on the construction community to help it deliver, Tercek says. Often, the work funded by TNC and executed by engineering firms ends up being counted as work-in-kind toward a cost-share partner contribution to a federal project.
"TNC is the type of group that has the ability to put pressure on individuals, the government and stakeholders to really make that investment, to make the large-scale improvements that need to be made," says Scott M. Arends, a dam-safety and water-resources engineer with Hanson Professional Services Inc., Springfield, Ill. Hanson is an engineering sub and Arends is its project manager on TNC's Emiquon Preserve wetlands restoration project in Illinois. "In addition to calling attention to the issues, they are good at taking action. They are able to move the Earth," Arends says.
As a decentralized, project-based organization, TNC does not have a unified research budget. Research generally is tied to individual project funding. But Tercek claims TNC's contributions to science are substantial, with scientists and other experts spread throughout the organization to "ensure the longevity and accountability of our work," he says. They publish about 200 peer-reviewed articles each year, he says.
In the next evolution of TNC, Tercek sees a broadening scope to the impact of cities on nature and cities' use of natural resources.
"We're interested in how [urban areas] protect their water supplies, how they deal with storms and floods, and how we can make nature part of the urban experience," he says. "It's a new area for us but one that we're excited to be engaged in. We must double down on what we've learned and use our strengths to vastly accelerate conservation."
