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Ensuring that conserved lands remain protected in perpetuity requires careful financial planning. These Stewardship Reserve Calculators help land trusts estimate the funds needed to support the long-term stewardship of a property, including monitoring, legal defense, and management costs. These tools provide data-driven projections to help land trusts set realistic financial goals and ensure the sustainability of their conservation commitments.
Terrafirma’s Legal Defense Reserves Calculator (simpler, LTA membership required)
“Everyone knows it is a question of “when” rather than “if” a land trust will have to pay significant enforcement expenses to protect its land and conservation easements. Projecting actual costs or how often a land trust will need defense funds is difficult, but now it is easier with this new calculator.
By entering your land trust’s information as indicated, the calculator determines the minimum reserve levels for your land trust based on your current circumstances. This approach addresses funding reserves for legal challenges to both conservation easements and land owned outright, based on actuarial data from land trusts, but does not address funds for routine stewardship or land management.”
The Nature Conservancy’s Stewardship Calculator (more complex)
“We can invest a great deal of time and money in protecting and restoring a site, but the key to achieving lasting conservation outcomes is to ensure that sufficient funding is available for long-term stewardship of the site into the future. Unfortunately, costs associated with long-term stewardship are inherently difficult to predict and often underestimated. If adequate funds are not set aside, there’s the risk that the natural resources will become degraded over time. For compensatory mitigation sites, this could ultimately result in a net loss of aquatic resources or needing to raise additional funds to maintain the site, both of which would mean the original project does not meet its full mitigation requirements.
To help tackle this problem, The Nature Conservancy convened national experts to develop a free and simple calculator that estimates stewardship costs and the amount that should be set aside to provide a secure source of future funding.
The calculator can be used by land managers to estimate the long-term stewardship costs associated with voluntary conservation projects, both for conservation easements and fee-owned land.”