A Restoration Agenda for the 21st Century

We are at the start of a Restoration Century during which we will see expanded efforts to restore the landscapes, air and water that have been damaged throughout centuries of development, resource extraction and carelessness. As we transition away from fossil fuels, the patterns of decline in America’s natural systems will not recover on their own. We need to grow our capacity to mitigate centuries of damage and restore broad swaths of our natural areas, which serve as critical habitats for wildlife, create an important buffer for our natural systems from human development, provide resilience to the impacts of climate change, and ensure an important source for our nation’s drinking water supplies. The current pace of restoration is too slow to solve our environmental degradation problems in our lifetime. We are informing key stakeholders about how to make ecological restoration happen faster, cheaper and more efficiently.

In addition, we work to expand and build natural resource mitigation efforts into Tribal nations and create opportunities for compensatory mitigation policies for ecological restoration on Tribal lands and for Tribal trust resources.

The nature of our work is inherently interdisciplinary. For additional information, read about our work in Procurement & Finance.

Our Initiatives

Publications

Blogs

Our Principles

  • Create Incentives.

    Create government preference for environmental outcomes delivered in advance of payment (i.e., pay for success) to lower taxpayer risk, encourage innovation, and create more certain environmental benefits.

  • Remove Barriers.

    Remove regulatory barriers to ecological restoration, ecological carbon sequestration, water quality restoration, and wildlife restoration.

  • Invest in Restoration

    Promote direct investment in ecological restoration.

  • Value Co-Benefits.

    Build rewards or requirements into ecological restoration projects that create and fairly price environmental justice and other co-benefits.

  • Promote continuous improvement.

    Support continuous improvement in models and other systems to quantify and credit environmental improvements and to track long-term durability of those improvements, and support efficiencies which ensure that quantification and monitoring doesn’t thwart restoration potential.

  • Recognize Value of Avoidance.

    Support policies that build the costs of avoidance and replacement of ecological and climate damage into the costs of development projects.