CLiF Notes: Jumping Into 2023

Our Conservation Lands Foundation team is jumping into the new year with focus and momentum. 

In our first 2023 edition of CLiF Notes, we’re excited to share below a few highlights of recent progress on our three key strategies to protect, restore and expand National Conservation Lands essential to slowing the climate and biodiversity crises.  

Our Time to Care campaign is bringing needed funding for America’s National Conservation Lands. Photo: Bureau of Land Management, California

Mobilizing Community

The National Conservation Lands system has nearly doubled in size since its inception in 2000. Yet, annual funding for the Bureau of Land Management to properly take care of these important places has not kept up with this dramatic growth.

As we expand the National Conservation Lands system, we need to ensure funding is in place for the staffing and resources necessary to restore wildlife habitat, protect cultural resources and improve recreational infrastructure like trails and signage. 

Over the past four years, we’ve led a community mobilization campaign of more than 100 national and grassroots organizations, including our Friends Grassroots Network, to increase funding for the Bureau of Land Management to take care of the National Conservation Lands.

We’re excited that our steady work and dedication secured a 25 percent funding increase for National Conservation Lands as part of the 2023 Interior budget. This is the biggest year-to-year funding increase Congress has provided for the National Conservation Lands to date. 

Learn more here.

We’re supporting land management that prioritizes conservation over extraction. Photo: Bureau of Land Management, Oregon.

Improving Land Management

As the largest caretaker of public lands in the country, the Bureau of Land Management has an enormous responsibility to protect the remaining valuable and vulnerable climate-resilient landscapes across the West. 

With 85 percent of the lands the Bureau manages unprotected, we’re aggressively working to ensure a greater balance for restoring, conserving and sustainably managing these lands. 

We’re collaborating with policymakers and uplifting the public’s support for conserving these lands for our water, wildlife and way of life. Our most recent efforts are reflected in these opinion editorials from the New York Times and the Durango Herald. 

Growing Public Support 

Conservation requires the ongoing support of communities and it’s essential we continually bring more people into the movement. Earlier this month, I had the pleasure of joining environmental leaders across the country in a meeting with U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris to uplift local communities’ deep and broad public support for arresting the climate crisis, which includes the conservation and stewardship of America’s public lands. And our work to harness community power to designate Avi Kwa Ame in Nevada as a National Monument was reflected in a story in the New York Times this week. 

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