Environment
The Foundation's newest program area is focused on creating cleaner, healthier rivers and oceans; ensuring access to an abundant supply of clean water and healthy seafood; and supporting the millions of people in America and around the world whose lives and livelihoods depend on fishing. The Foundation aims to encourage and support the restoration and conservation of marine and freshwater ecosystems — on a meaningful scale — through market-based strategies that provide economic rewards for sustainable resource use.
Initiatives
- Dramatically Improving Fisheries Management Practices
- Ensuring Efficient and Rapid Restoration of Mississippi and Colorado Rivers, River Basins and Delta Wetlands
- Developing Networks of Marine Protected Areas in International Biodiversity Hotspots
Dramatically Improving Fisheries Management Practices
The Foundation supports urgently needed fisheries management reform, with an emphasis on fisheries in the Gulfs of Mexico and California. Our grants focus on four critical areas:
- Preventing Overfishing – The Foundation seeks to strengthen fisheries management by encouraging the adoption of precautionary catch limits based on sound science
- Encouraging the Creation of Dedicated Access Privileges – Dedicated access management systems – such as the tradeable quota system established several years ago in Alaska’s halibut fishery – create incentives for long-term sustainability and provide market-based vehicles for rationalizing fishing capacity
- Creating Marine Managed Areas – The Foundation supports the establishment of networks of marine managed areas that will conserve critical habitat, protect threatened species of ocean wildlife, and contribute to the replenishment of fisheries.
- Using Markets to Encourage Sustainable Fishing – The Foundation supports the development of mechanisms, such as fisheries certification, that enable consumers and seafood buyers to distinguish fish that are harvested sustainably so their purchasing power can encourage prudent fisheries management.
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Ensuring Efficient and Rapid Restoration of Mississippi and Colorado Rivers, River Basins and Delta Wetlands
The Foundation supports projects that combine good science, landowner incentives and creative water management to significantly improve the health of the Mississippi and Colorado Rivers and their Delta wetlands and to restore and protect their invaluable contribution to regional and global ecology.
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Developing Networks of Marine Protected Areas in International Biodiversity Hotspots
The Foundation is currently supporting comprehensive marine conservation and restoration projects in the Eastern Tropical Pacific Seascape, centered around the Galapagos, and the Coral Triangle Seascape in Indonesia and the Southern Philippines. Preserving these ecosystems' unique biodiversity requires carefully designing and implementing networks of protected areas large enough to encompass their complexity and protect them against the massive threats — such as overfishing and dynamite fishing — that they face.
These seascapes are located in some of the most biologically important corners of the world’s oceans. Protecting them will require a wide variety of initiatives, from scientific delineation of protected areas to policy and regulatory development, community education and training. Committed to making the broad range of investments necessary to conserve these seascapes, the Foundation remains focused on achieving real, measurable, on-the-ground results.