Building and Implementing Visions for Sustainable Landscapes
The landscapes of the North American West face pressing challenges: availability and quality of water supplies; haphazard urban growth; the need for sustainable public funding for conservation; and protecting key landscapes, rivers, and corridors in the face of climate change.
Resources Law Group builds strategies and implements programs that directly address these challenges. Our efforts identify and protect critical habitat and corridors throughout the Western United States, particularly California, and the coastal areas of Northwest Mexico (for more information on the Northwest Mexico program, click here). They have especially focused on landscape-level approaches to the conservation of California’s working landscapes and the protection of its wild lands and rivers as well as a healthy, functioning ecosystem in the San Francisco Bay Area. Each effort requires its own blend of strategies and tools: land protection through acquisition; public opinion research; communications planning and targeted outreach; legal analysis; political and policy consulting; applied science; regional collaboration and prioritization among community organizations as well as capacity building support for key conservation organizations. Our nimble structure and creativity allow us to respond effectively to the unique requirements and opportunities presented in each project.
Our planning processes convene scientists and other experts, conservation organizations, and diverse stakeholders and public agencies to develop comprehensive strategies that ensure the most significant and measurable outcomes. Once planning is complete, we remain engaged, working with consultants, developing and cultivating projects, convening stakeholders, and providing guidance to collaborative conservation and policy efforts, from wilderness designation and hydropower relicensing, to land use and forest management planning.
RLG’s direct engagement in ongoing efforts is often crucial to success. For example, in the face of continued threats of development in key lands and habitat, we assemble and direct political, opinion, and communications consultants, conservation and community groups, and public agencies, to protect in perpetuity these lands and the resource values they support.