--- title: landscape-scale conservation needs a way to pay across the fence canonical_url: https://ensurance.app/guide/landscape-scale-conservation-needs-a-way-to-pay-across-the-fence markdown_url: https://ensurance.app/guide/landscape-scale-conservation-needs-a-way-to-pay-across-the-fence.md subtitle: "water, fire, animals, and soil cross the property line. the money has to as well" category: ecosystem-services --- # landscape-scale conservation needs a way to pay across the fence *water, fire, animals, and soil cross the property line. the money has to as well* Landscape-scale conservation means working at the scale the water, the fire, the animals, and the soil actually move — a watershed, a fireshed, a migration route — across many owners and jurisdictions, not one parcel at a time. A ranch, a national forest, a Tribal allotment, a county road, a city's intake: the land is divided by fences, and the things that keep it alive are not. The ecology crosses the fence. The funding usually does not. The headwater forest, the floodplain, the meadow, and the run of fish exist — and already trade water, shade, soil, and food with each other — whether or not anyone funds a project on them. Ensurance gives each one an account so the people who depend on it can pay into the network. The network is not the forest. ## what travels, and what travels with it A landscape is held together by a handful of links. Each carries a service in one direction and a risk in the same direction, and the property line does not change which way it runs. | link | the service that travels | the risk that travels | |---|---|---| | water downhill | snowmelt held in soil and released slowly through the dry months | flood in spring, a dry creek in August, a reservoir filling with debris | | moisture downwind | rain a forest helps make for the farms and towns in its lee | a drier season for everyone downwind when the canopy is gone | | fire along fuel | a thinned stand that burns low and leaves the big trees standing | a crown fire that does not stop at the ownership map | | animals along corridors | deer, elk, salmon, and pollinators moving between the places they need | a herd cut off at a highway, a run cut off at a dam | | sediment to the intake | stable banks and meadows that filter water before it reaches the pipe | a treatment bill, a dredging bill, a boil notice | Good and bad travel the same links. That is why the usual way of paying for conservation — one owner, one grant, one project boundary — fits the problem badly. The owner who does the work is often not the one who collects the benefit, and the one who collects it was never asked to pay. A project funded that way can be excellent and still end at the fence. ## one forest, three payors In **2018**, Blue Forest launched the first Forest Resilience Bond, **Yuba I**, on the Tahoe National Forest in California. Four investors — the Rockefeller Foundation, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, CSAA Insurance, and Calvert Impact Capital — put up **$4 million** for forest restoration across a **15,000-acre** planning area, implemented by the National Forest Foundation. The work was completed in **2023**, and the investors got all their capital back, in line with expectations. Look at who repaid them. **Yuba Water Agency, the U.S. Forest Service, and CAL FIRE** each paid the bond back, and each has a different stake in the same trees: the utility that depends on the water below the forest, the federal agency that manages the land, the state fire agency. Three reasons, three budgets, one stand of trees. Yuba Water's share is a payor paying in its own unit. The agency committed **$1.5 million** as **$300,000 a year for five years** — a line item a utility can carry, not a one-time gift. It also did a specific job: Yuba Water's payments cover the interest, so grant dollars that cannot pay interest can still fund the work on the ground. Then one project became a network. Yuba I helped catalyze the **North Yuba Forest Partnership** in **2019** — **nine** federal, Tribal, state, and local agencies and nonprofits working across **275,000 acres** of the North Yuba River watershed. In **2021** that work was financed at a different scale: **Yuba II**, a **$25 million** Forest Resilience Bond that treats over **28,000 acres** to protect nearly **48,000**. Yuba Water committed **$6 million** this time, alongside the USDA Forest Service, the California Wildlife Conservation Board, and the Bonneville Environmental Foundation's corporate water replenishment program. Blue Forest names the North Yuba watershed as the homelands of the Nisenan People and intertribal regions of the Mountain Maidu, Konkow, and Washoe, and it partners with the Nevada City Rancheria Nisenan Tribe in the work. The first project did not grow because someone wrote a bigger grant for the same 15,000 acres. It grew because the people repaying it were the people who depended on the forest, and once they were in the habit of paying across the fence, more partners and more acres could join. Yuba used a bond, not an ensurance instrument. The lesson transfers. The paperwork does not have to. ## water funds: twenty-six cities, one pattern The same pattern runs at city scale, and has for a quarter century. In **2000**, Quito set up **FONAG**, Latin America's first water fund: the city's downstream water users paying, through one standing fund, for many upstream conservation projects at once. In **2011** the Inter-American Development Bank, the FEMSA Foundation, the Global Environment Facility, and The Nature Conservancy founded the **Latin American Water Funds Partnership** to carry the model across the region. By **2024** it counted **26 water funds** in 26 cities and more than **340 organizations**. The shape is the same each time: one downstream payor pool, many upstream projects, an institution in the middle so the payments outlast any grant cycle. The Quito story itself is in [what quito depends on](/guide/what-quito-depends-on). Paying across the fence is a working pattern on two continents. It is not a US idea. ## regional resilience is three things Regional resilience is the reason to work at this scale, and the word usually gets spent on only one of its three parts. **Ecological resilience** is the links holding: snow that stays in the soil, a fire that stays on the ground, a herd that can still reach winter range, sediment that stays on the slope. It is what the Yuba partners pay for, acre by acre. **Social resilience** is who pays. The people who hunt, fish, farm, irrigate, and drink there are the payors, not an audience to be persuaded. A project paid by the people it serves does not have to re-earn its existence every three years in front of a foundation board. It has a constituency with a line item. **Cultural resilience** is the ditch, the run, the hunt — the way a community has kept a place for generations — staying in that community's hands instead of becoming someone else's program. What that means in any one valley is for the people of that valley to say. The general case is enough: a network that pays the people who already keep a place lasts longer than one that works around them. This is also why the ask is never "fund the world's water." A utility has a line item for its water. A county has a budget for its road and the slope above it. A town has a lake it has fished for a hundred years. Not the world's water — their water, their road, their lake. Why that is the only ask that works is the subject of [your water is not water](/guide/your-water-is-not-water). ## an account for each link Yuba had a bond to put capital on the ground up front and a team to structure it. Most landscapes start with less: a few people who depend on the work and are willing to pay, and no standing place for those payments to land and be routed. An account fills that second gap. It does not replace up-front finance. In **ensurance**, each place or purpose holds an account in its own name. A **syndicate** is an account that coordinates the projects along one link — water, fire, corridor — so the people who depend on that link can pay into it without a separate agreement with every owner. Three are live today: [water-cycle.syndicate](/water-cycle.syndicate?from=guide), [wildfire-resilience.syndicate](/wildfire-resilience.syndicate?from=guide), and [wildlife-corridor.syndicate](/wildlife-corridor.syndicate?from=guide). A **certificate** on a named place is a share of that one place. **Proceeds** can route a set share of what one account receives onward to the accounts it depends on — readable on [proceeds](/proceeds?from=guide), walked through in [projects that fund each other](/guide/projects-that-fund-each-other). The operator sets the split. Volumes are small and the network is young. It grows one node at a time. Overlap is resilience. The same headwater forest can sit in a water network and a fire network at once, because it does both jobs. The utility pays it as water. The fire district pays it as fuel. Neither has to be convinced of the other's reason. :::johnson **the fence is a property line, not a hydrologic one.** Water, fire, animals, and soil already cross it. The regions that hold are the ones where the money learned to follow — paid by the people downstream, downwind, and downhill who depend on the work. [how to fund the project you depend on →](/guide/how-to-fund-the-project-you-depend-on) ::: ## frequently asked questions ### what is landscape-scale conservation? Landscape-scale conservation is conservation planned and paid for at the scale ecological processes actually operate — a watershed, a fireshed, a migration route — across many landowners and jurisdictions rather than one parcel at a time. It holds when the people who depend on what the landscape produces help pay for the work, wherever on the map it happens. ### why does a region need more than one project? Because the things a region depends on travel. One project can restore a meadow or thin a stand, but the water, the fire, and the animals keep going across the property line. A region needs the links to hold end to end: projects connected to each other and paid by the people at both ends. ### who pays when the benefit crosses a property line? The people who receive it. In the Yuba watershed, a water agency, the U.S. Forest Service, and CAL FIRE repaid a forest restoration project because each depended on the same forest for a different reason. In 26 Latin American cities, downstream water users pay upstream projects through a water fund. Ensurance gives each link an account so a beneficiary can pay the node it depends on, and the node can route a share onward. ## where to go next The last post in this series is the practical one — find the node you depend on, pay it, let it pay what it depends on. Read [how to fund the project you depend on](/guide/how-to-fund-the-project-you-depend-on). If you run a watershed council or a landscape partnership trying to turn a good project into a network, [see how we work with regional collaboratives](/solutions/regional-collaboratives?from=guide&topic=networked-projects). ## sources [Blue Forest — Yuba I Forest Resilience Bond](https://www.blueforest.org/our-impact/our-projects/yuba-i-frb/) — 2018 launch, $4 million from four investors, 15,000-acre planning area on the Tahoe National Forest, National Forest Foundation implementation, repayment by Yuba Water Agency, the U.S. Forest Service, and CAL FIRE, completion in 2023 [Blue Forest — Yuba II Forest Resilience Bond](https://www.blueforest.org/our-impact/our-projects/yuba-ii-frb/) — North Yuba Forest Partnership (2019, nine partners, 275,000 acres), Yuba II ($25 million, over 28,000 acres treated to protect nearly 48,000), funders, acknowledgment of the Nisenan People and partnership with the Nevada City Rancheria Nisenan Tribe [Blue Forest — Yuba II press release, 26 October 2021](https://www.blueforest.org/our-impact/insights-news-resources/yuba-ii-frb-press-release/) — Yuba II launch, Yuba Water's $6 million commitment, funder list [Yuba Water Agency — Forest Resilience Bond](https://www.yubawater.org/256/Forest-Resilience-Bond) — the agency's $1.5 million cost-share on Yuba I, covering the interest owed to private investors so state and federal grants that cannot pay interest can fund the work [Duke Nicholas Institute — Yuba Project Forest Resilience Bond case study (PDF)](https://nicholasinstitute.duke.edu/sites/default/files/project/green-banks-and-community-lenders-financing-nature-based-solutions/case-study-library/yuba-project-forest-resilience-bond_NBS-case-study_1.pdf) — Yuba Water's contractual payment of $300,000 a year over five years to help repay investors [FEMSA — Alianza Latinoamericana de Fondos de Agua, 2024 (PDF)](https://www.femsa.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/Alianza-Latinoamericana-de-Fondos-de-Agua-WWW-2024.pdf) — partnership created in 2011 by the IDB, FEMSA Foundation, GEF, and TNC, later joined by IKI; 26 water funds in 26 Latin American cities and 340+ organizations by 2024 ## the series 1. [what a networked project actually is](/guide/what-a-networked-project-actually-is) 2. [why conservation projects fail on their own](/guide/why-conservation-projects-fail-on-their-own) 3. [nature already runs a portfolio](/guide/nature-already-runs-a-portfolio) 4. [landscape-scale conservation needs a way to pay across the fence](/guide/landscape-scale-conservation-needs-a-way-to-pay-across-the-fence) 5. [how to fund the project you depend on](/guide/how-to-fund-the-project-you-depend-on)