Adapting Conservation Easements to Climate Change

Abstract

Perpetual conservation easements (CEs) are popular for restricting development and land use, but their fixed terms create challenges for adaptation to climate change. The increasing pace of environmental and social change demands adaptive conservation instruments. To examine the adaptive potential of CEs, we surveyed 269 CEs and interviewed 73 conservation organization employees. Although only 2% of CEs mentioned climate change, the majority of employees were concerned about climate change impacts. CEs share the fixed-boundary limits typical of protected areas with additional adaptation constraints due to permanent terms on private lands. CEs often have multiple, potentially conflicting purposes that protect against termination but complicate decisions about principled, conservation-oriented adaptation. Monitoring is critical for shaping adaptive responses, but only 35% of CEs allowed organizations to conduct ecological monitoring. In addition, CEs provided few requirements or incentives for active stewardship of private lands. We found four primary options for changing land use restrictions, each with advantages and risks: CE amendment, management plan revisions, approval of changes through discretionary consent, and updating laws or policies codified in the CE. Conservation organizations, funders, and the Internal Revenue Service should promote processes for principled adaptation in CE terms, provide more active stewardship of CE lands, and consider alternatives to the CE tool.

Are conservation organizations configured for effective adaptation to global change?

“…Conservation investments typically used in land protection and management vary widely in terms of their flexibility. For example, fee simple acquisitions (Panel 1) offer greater flexibility over land management than easement acquisitions, in which conservation organizations contract with landowners to secure protection only against particular threats (Rissman et al 2014). Short-term (5-10-yr) conservation contracts, commonly used in agricultural systems, offer conservation organizations greater scope to no longer invest in particular sites if these are no longer deemed as important ecologically.…”

The rise of novelty in ecosystems

“…Unfortunately, recent trends in conservation policy may make it harder to adapt to high levels of novelty. One of these trends is the switch from land protection via outright purchase of land to the purchase of conservation easements on private lands that restrict future development and other land uses (Rissman et al 2015). Conservation easements are popular for good reasons: purchasing only some of the rights is cheaper, and creates conservation opportunities when landowners are unwilling to sell their land but agreeable to easement restriction on their land use.…”

“…Conservation easements are popular for good reasons: purchasing only some of the rights is cheaper, and creates conservation opportunities when landowners are unwilling to sell their land but agreeable to easement restriction on their land use. The drawback is that perpetual easements inherently assume no change by fixing certain purposes, rights, and restrictions in perpetuity, often without identifying processes for changing these terms (Rissman et al 2015). Furthermore, conservation easements confer only partial property rights, so land management agencies have much less discretionary authority on how to manage the land (Rissman et al 2015).…”

Application of a coupled human natural system framework to organize and frame challenges and opportunities for biodiversity conservation on private lands.

“…Individual easement terms, based on the original landowners' objectives, will determine if variation occurs on particular properties over time, dictating the extent of future land use scenarios. Although the permanent temporal scale of a conservation easement may be appealing, the same permanence may limit future value because fixed boundaries limit the ability of an individual easement to adapt to or provide benefits under future climate change (Rissman et al 2015). These examples of temporal effects creating challenges and opportunities for conservation efforts further illustrate how interconnected elements of CHANS are, as they also relate to feedbacks, nonlinear dynamics, and scale within and between the human and natural subsystems.…”