This year flew by, and we're already looking ahead to another year of building resilient communities and healthy ecosystems. But we wanted to take a moment to mention a few of our proudest accomplishments from 2017:
Earth Economics has long managed a robust internship program that provides training and practical experience to undergraduate and post-doc students. Internship experiences have motivated graduate degrees, new career focuses and passions, and long term positions with Earth Economics. The following post was written by Alia Kabir, a 2017 Summer Intern and a current Senior at the University of Puget Sound, in Tacoma, WA.
We recently published an online version of our 2016 Annual Report. Below is an excerpt, the "Letter from Our Leaders," which opens the report. The letter summarizes Earth Economics' recent accomplishments and lays out a bright vision for the future.
In this time of dysfunctional national and international governance, cities have a unique opportunity to fill a void in leadership. Can a group of U.S. and world cities model the kinds of networked, scalable solutions we need to create a more resilient world? One big-thinking international project is betting that cities can and will.
It's easy to take national forests for granted. Many city-dwellers think about them only on weekend excursions – when hiking, biking, or skiing. Besides acting as our playgrounds, what else do national forests do for us? Earth Economics is helping to shed light on the subject by partnering with The Wilderness Society for an economic analysis of the many benefits provided by Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest.
The Columbia River Basin is a vast, abundant watershed and the foundation for communities, fish and wildlife, and economic activity. Earth Economics has just released a new report that demonstrates the immense value of the Columbia River Basin’s natural capital - $198 billion in value annually.
Our nation's water infrastructure needs work. Yet, the question remains - what kind of investments should we make? A recent American Rivers report written in collaboration with Earth Economics makes a compelling case for investing in green infrastructure, or infrastructure that supports natural biological systems. Green infrastructure both improves economies and delivers diverse social benefits.
On April 26, 2017, President Trump signed an executive order requiring a governmental review of all national monument designations made since 1996. First up for review is Bears Ears National Monument -- over a million acres of mesas, canyons, shrublands, forests, and Native American archaeological sites in Southeastern Utah. We took a quick look at its natural capital value and found its worth to be over $1 billion in ecosystem services benefits.