Scaling Climate Resilience and Sustainable Conservation in Sentinel Landscapes
By Chris Wolff, Reed Benoit, and Shaun O’Rourke
To enhance climate resilience at scale it is critical to bring non-traditional partners – and sources of capital – to the same table. This is easy to say but hard to do in practice.
Quantified Ventures acts as an accelerator for climate resilience projects and initiatives by leveraging our expertise in blended financing, our strong network of funders and partners, a focus on outcomes, and the ability to quickly adapt to evolving needs.
Fort Huachuca Sentinel Landscape
The impact of this approach is illustrated through our work to accelerate the speed and scale of investment into nature-based solutions across the Sentinel Landscapes Partnership. There are currently 18 Sentinel Landscapes across the country, with more than 677,000 permanently protected acres and more than 4.4 million enrolled acres. Each partnership is comprised of “a coalition of federal agencies, state and local governments, and non-governmental organizations that work with willing landowners and land managers to advance sustainable land use practices around military installations and ranges” for the benefit of local economies, recreation access, conservation, and climate resilience.
To qualify for the partnership and be designated a Sentinel Landscape, an area must sit at the intersection of conservation, working lands, and national defense interests. More specifically, this means it must be home to at least one military installation or range and priority lands as designated by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), Department of Defense (DOD), Department of Interior (DOI), and Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). While these may seem like non-traditional partners for conservation and climate resilience initiatives, at QV has a proven track record of engaging novel collaborators to drive meaningful outcomes for people and planet.
Partners gather in Sierra Vista, Arizona, for a White House Council on Environmental Quality event in November 2023.
Cochise County, Arizona is home to Fort Huachuca, a U.S. Army installation where QV has been deeply engaged for the past 18 months. The base is the county’s largest employer, and the landscape includes the San Pedro Riparian National Conservation Area (SPRNCA) , a Congressionally-designed protected area that serves to enhance the diminishing desert riparian ecosystem. Working with these anchor institutions and other partners in Cochise County, QV brought fresh eyes, energy, and expertise to a partnership developing an integrated, place-based approach that attracted additional capital to critical groundwater recharge projects.
In collaboration with the local government in Sierra Vista, the county’s most populous city, and a coalition of groups that comprise the Cochise Conservation and Recharge Network (CCRN), QV helped secure millions in new funding.
QV assisted the City of Sierra Vista in securing more than $1 million from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation’s “America the Beautiful” Challenge to support groundwater protection of the SPRNCA. This funding also provided a two-year window for the modeling and development of an innovative long-term operational, maintenance, and monitoring endowment.
Concurrently, QV partnered with the CCRN to reimagine and repackage a scaled water augmentation program with larger potential impacts (and bigger funding needs). QV led the development of a $3MM grant proposal to Arizona WIFA for the implementation of a priority stormwater and aquifer recharge project at Ft. Huachuca. In early 2024, the WIFA board approved the full $3 million dollar amount unanimously, marking a major win for local partners and regional water sustainability.
Building on these successes and the identified local need, QV and the local leadership commission submitted to the Department of Defense the financial modeling for an $80MM long-term stewardship endowment, which includes funds from the commission to seed the endowment. The endowment will address the longstanding challenge of funding the operations, maintenance, and monitoring of regional projects essential to the San Pedro River and mission-critical elements of the Army. (At the time of this writing the endowment is not fully established).
QV’s mission and goal aligns closely with the Fort Huachuca Sentinel Landscape efforts to restore the local groundwater sources and proactively protect natural resources, the local economy, and those who depend on it, for future generations.
Another example of QV’s work with multi-sector partners in and around Sentinel Landscapes lies in Texas Hill Country. QV assisted the Edwards Aquifer Authority with required documents to support the Authority’s $14MM Clean Water State Revolving Loan Fund application to the Texas Water Development Board. The Camp Bullis Sentinel Landscape lies within the Edwards Aquifer contributing and recharge zones.
QV works side-by-side with our partners to think big, be bold, monetize outcomes, broaden the tent of potential capital providers, and develop replicable models that benefit climate and communities for the long term. These practices are at the core of our work with the Sentinel Landscapes Partnership and the DOD’s Readiness and Environmental Protection Integration (REPI) program.
And they have broader applications as we accelerate the development of investible climate solutions and attract more capital to climate, nature, and resilience finance.
Climate and resilience project developers must be open to engaging non-traditional partners and tools to bring outcomes-aligned financing and funding to fruition. Being willing to think bigger, bolder, and broader when it comes to project outcomes, partners, and capital sources can open the door to new opportunities that deliver results for climate and communities.
QV’s Sentinel Landscapes conservation finance work is made possible with the support of the DoD REPI program and the U.S. Endowment for Forestry and Communities.