Green Infrastructure

Green Infrastructure Transect

Photo: Courtesy of TCH and the Center for Applied Transect Studies

Image shows detail of how green infrastructure works on different scales.

The Conservation Fund and Green Infrastructure

Just as we need smart growth to strategically direct development, we need "smart conservation." Smart conservation allows communities to grow while maintaining a healthy environment. That's green infrastructure.

Infrastructure is often thought of in terms of highways and power grids or gas pipelines. This infrastructure allows people to commute to work, watch television, and use washing machines without having to worry about how or what makes this possible. In much the same way, green infrastructure provides crucial services, such as clean air, drinking water and local food, to communities. These are known as ecosystem services. Green infrastructure planning identifies areas where nature is benefiting communities and ensures those areas are protected.

In recent years, the term "green infrastructure" has been used to refer to everything from green roofs to more ecologically friendly stormwater management systems. While these definitions differ, they all underscore that our built environment and our ecological environment are connected.

Green infrastructure network

At The Conservation Fund, we see green infrastructure as a network of natural areas and open spaces—woodlands, wetlands, trails and parks—that conserves ecosystems, helps sustain clean air and water and provides many other benefits to people and wildlife.

We also think of green infrastructure as a process—a way to identify the best lands to accommodate development and infrastructure while also considering the best lands to conserve. This planning approach is a collaborative effort that engages a broad community of both conservation and development leaders. Regional governments, land trusts, private organizations and others can lead green infrastructure planning efforts.

(Click image to enlarge)

Click here to learn more about our Strategic Conservation Services.

What is our green infrastructure approach?

The Conservation Fund draws from its strategic conservation toolkit to help city and county planners, regional and watershed organizations, natural resource agencies and nonprofits craft strategies that balance land protection and development. The results of a green infrastructure planning process are often maps, posters and reports that articulate a vision of a healthy community that benefits humans and nature.

Over the past decade, green infrastructure planning has evolved from a novelty practice in specific locations into a national planning method. The Fund has helped make this evolution happen, bringing green infrastructure to communities across the United States. Diverse communities and regions ranging from the North Star Borough in Alaska to Salt Lake City, Utah, to Indianapolis, Indiana and Jefferson County, West Virginia, all are in varying stages of green infrastructure planning processes.

How can green infrastructure benefit your community?

Green infrastructure offers many significant benefits. When there is an increase in the amount of land for natural stormwater retention, communities become more disaster resistant. Public health improves when residents have expanded access to walking and biking trails. Green infrastructure also can reduce the erosion of precious top soil, which aids local farms. The entire region benefits when a collection of local farms can provide healthy food. Working farms—and forests—also have a significant impact on local economies by providing jobs, aiding tourism and supporting local manufacturing.

Green Infrastructure and Mitigation

Today, green infrastructure planning is rewriting the process for how to undertake mitigation for gray infrastructure projects. When a large public works project, such as a highway or a natural gas line, affects a federally listed rare and endangered species or damages a wetland, those impacts must be compensated for through the protection or restoration of alternative habitat. In the past, mitigation often resulted in the protection of marginal habitat that did not serve the best interests of the impacted species. Green infrastructure networks provide an opportunity to find the best mitigation sites and help to identify mitigation opportunities that at the same time advance community planning objectives.

Leadership

From its hallmark book "Green Infrastructure" and its Better Models publications to professional training courses offered through the Conservation Leadership Network, the Fund brings the nation’s foremost strategic conservation specialists to America’s towns, counties and states.

In 2011, The Conservation Fund successfully completed a project supported by a Section 6 Cooperative Endangered Species Conservation Fund grant entitled “Determining Mitigation Needs for NiSource Natural Gas Transmission Facilities—Implementation of the Multi-Species Habitat Conservation Plan (MSHCP).” We developed a geographic ecosystem-based decision support framework that helps find the best locations for mitigation for impacted federal listed species addressed by the MSHCP. This transparent, defensible decision-making process for selecting mitigation projects serves as a model for future strategic mitigation efforts to harmonize green and gray infrastructure. Learn more about the NiSource project.

The Fund produced a 15-page implementation plan that is available for download as a PDF

America’s Best Results

The Conservation Fund is helping communities nationwide maintain connected networks of conservation lands while accommodating development.

GreenInfrastructure.Net

The Fund started GreenInfrastructure.Net with funding from USDA Cooperative Forestry and the Surdna Foundation as a resource and clearinghouse for information about implementing the green infrastructure approach. The Green Infrastructure Work Group, a collection of local, state and federal government agencies and nongovernmental organizations, also provided support. The Work Group originally came together in August 1999 to begin developing a training program that would help communities and their partners make green infrastructure an integral part of local and regional plans and community decisions. The Web site features case studies, publications, training courses and links to other resources.