September 9, 2013

AGree on Collaborative Watershed and Landscape Management

Last Friday the 13th World Water Week came to a close, having brought experts together to explore cooperation and partnership in issues related to water. A recent report on watershed management in the United States emphasized this same theme of collaborative management and partnerships, and drawing our focus on water to a close. Multi-stakeholder engagement in watershed restoration in the Little Snake River Conservation District, Wyoming is striving to enhance endangered species habitat while maintaining the complex production landscape of crops and livestock. In the upper Midwestern states, the Sand County Foundation is developing market mechanisms to incentivize landscape-scale nutrient management strategies where agricultural runoff and impaired waterways are of significant concern. And similar to the case of payments for watershed services in Costa Rica highlighted last week, the South Florida Water Management District has pioneered an incentive program for ranchers in an important Everglades watershed.

The AGree initiative – Co-Chaired by Dan Glickman, Gary Hirshberg, Jim Mosely, and Emmy Simmons – is trying to drive change in the food and agriculture system, setting it up as a national priority. This report resulted from a workshop held in Washington, DC, convening leaders of a sampling of best-in-class watershed projects from across the US. Workshop participants discussed the most significant factors driving/catalyzing the emergence of collaborative watershed and landscape management; the most important enabling conditions to the successful execution of such initiatives; the obstacles to achieving intended watershed objectives; and potential policy and action strategies to advance the emergence of collaborative watershed and landscape management.

Ultimately from the range of cases presented, the need to target interventions became clear. Targeting hones in on areas that are vulnerable, that can achieve the “biggest bang for the buck”, and that yield both the social and biophysical benefits from a landscape.

Read the full report online.

Photo credit: USDA NRCS
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