Report: Leveraging Analytics & Funding for Restoration

Joe Whitworth
Joe Whitworth
President & CEO of The Freshwater Trust
English   |   Español

We hope you enjoy the eleventh edition of the Uplift Report and after you do, that you’ll continue supporting us by making a gift. Thank you for all that you’ve made possible.

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Some things are easy to see.
Others not so much.

But a pattern repeats itself in most all river basins: lots of good faith actors working to solve their specific problems, with no transparent way to connect how it all relates to other work or if it will lead to fixing the broader watershed.

Regulators set targets but can’t track progress toward them. Natural resource agencies, foundations, and utilities have money, but it’s trapped behind fragmented, technical funding programs. The farmers who manage the land and water don’t have clear financial offers or time to participate. A prioritization scheme to guide efficient investment on the ground almost never exists.

Because of all this, any project that gets done is a bit of a miracle.

A system like this can move money, but it evidently can’t spend it well: as a nation spending trillions of tax dollars on freshwater health and restoration since 1970, the U.S. has fixed less than half its stream miles.

The winning system for restoration will have analytics to identify specific priorities across an entire basin, tech to rapidly deploy funding to the best projects and track the results to the finish line.

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We’ve built and proven the tools to do this and are now scaling them up, with results coming in basin by basin. Our intent is to provide these tools to local economies and supply chains so that our partners can help their community, fix their watershed and put dinner on the table.

If that sounds impossible, it’s not. It just hasn’t been done before.

Many things this organization has done over its years fit that mold: from leading the effort to avert extinction of Pacific salmon to creating transactions for landowners to get paid to grow bushels of nature to securing a groundbreaking software patent for collaborative restoration, we specialize in taking big ideas to the ground.

With your help, that’s just what we do here. As you read through these pages, I hope you see what your generosity has built. To me, it’s as clear as day.

Yours in conservation,

Joe Whitworth

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October 30, 2023


#quantified conservation    #Uplift Report    

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