Our senior research analyst, Carson Risner, will be attending the 2024 Oregon Outdoor Recreation Summit this week, December 5-7th. The event is organized and hosted by the Oregon Trails Coalition, whose mission is to support, promote, and advocate for the preservation, development, and stewardship of a statewide network of sustainable trails.

The generous support of the Kresge Foundation has enabled Earth Economics to provide federal agencies, municipalities, utilities, community-based organizations, and other non-profit groups with applied ecological economic analysis, tools, support, and policy advocacy since 2013.

Earth Economics is the newest member of the Pacific Northwest Cooperative Ecosystem Studies Unit. CESUs provide research, technical assistance, and education to federal land management, environmental, and research agencies and their partners. Members from biological, physical, social, cultural, and engineering disciplines provide the expertise needed to address natural and cultural resource management issues at multiple landscape scales.

On June 15th, 2024, Carson Risner (Senior Research Analyst) presented at the Equitable Green Infrastructure in a Changing Climate webinar, part of the Green Infrastructure Webinar Series hosted by Shannon Sloane Pepper of the Southwest Environmental Finance Center, organized by the Environmental Finance Center network, and sponsored by the Environmental Protection Agency.

Glen Delaney and Carson Risner recently presented to the Green Infrastructure Federal Collaborative, a quarterly gathering of federal agency staff and mid-level managers who are experts on green infrastructure and larger nature-based solutions.

In 2023, the Land Trust Alliance partnered with Earth Economics to develop the Ecosystem Services Valuation Tool (ESVT), an accessible tool that can be used by land trusts to provide high-level estimates of the value of co-benefits generated by the lands they steward.

Thank you to all who attended our Earth Day webinar to launch our GiveBIG campaign for 2024. We are excited to share that we will be raising funds to support the Tacoma Tree Foundation (TTF) with an economic analysis. All funds raised during this year’s GiveBIG will be used to cover the staff time for Earth Economics to produce a benefit-cost analysis of TTF’s tree planting in and around Tacoma. If you missed it, you can view a recording of the webinar here.

On January 31, Angela Fletcher (Senior Researcher and Data and Tools Manager) presented our work valuing the co-benefits of rangeland management in the southwestern US at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Range Management in Sparks, NV. She summarized the results of the work, which reveal a broad sense of the economic importance of rangeland conservation investment in providing non-market benefits to communities.

In 2024, we will focus our pro bono efforts on expanding our schoolyard greening efforts. We are currently working with the Trust for Public Lands to assess the benefits that green schoolyards in Tacoma, WA provide to students, teachers, and the broader community. Please help us to increase the number of schools we can include in these assessments.

On August 1st, 2023, the White House Office of Management and Budget* (OMB) released draft guidance on Assessing Changes in Environmental and Ecosystem Services in Benefit-Cost Analysis for public comment. This is part of a broader strategy to develop natural capital accounting at the federal level. Here is our response.

Earth Economics with the Water Wise Gulf South Collective recently updated The Benefits of Community-Driven Green Infrastructure report, first published in 2021. This includes new community-gathered data from three new Water Wise neighborhoods. The expanded valuation covers aesthetics, avoided emissions, stormwater management, carbon sequestration, flood regulation, habitat, reduced heat, climate stability, and noise reduction benefits.

On June 1st, Ken Cousins (Research Principal at Earth Economics) presented our most recent work on outdoor recreation at the 2023 Annual Conference of the Inland Empire section of the American Planning Association, held in Priest Lake, Idaho. Ken summarized the results of the 2022 study, and described the innovative methods used to develop detailed estimates of visitation to state- managed lands in Washington state from 2019-2021.