Collaboration & Partnerships

The Centre for Land Conservation is committed to building partnerships with conservation practitioners, government, funders, industry and the public to collaborate nationally and regionally to find innovative ways to, conserve, restore, and sustainably manage more lands in Canada.

Regional Conservation and Climate Partnerships

A Regional Conservation Partnership (RCP) is a network of conservation organizations, Indigenous Peoples, communities, landowners, government, and other partners working together to achieve conservation and nature-smart climate action on a landscape scale. RCPs are often informal, with structure and governance tailored to each region’s needs.‍

By working together for their local landscapes individuals and organizations can create durable conservation outcomes designed with their communities, and the climate, in mind.‍

A typical RCP creates a conservation vision for the geography in question, and agrees on priorities for conservation securement, stewardship, restoration, and climate action at the landscape level, as well as on sustainable development actions. They then implement the agreed upon actions, and work to ensure that coordination of partners is sustainable long-term. Aligning around a common vision increases the likelihood of achieving shared objectives, enabling partners to build a stronger case for support and increasing all partners’ capacity.

Informed by research and consultations with similar partnerships in Canada and the US, the Centre for Land Conservation is currently exploring the potential for Regional Conservation and Climate Partnerships to accelerate the pace of conservation in Canada.

Building a Landscape Conservation Approach

This working paper reviews the growth of Regional Conservation Partnerships (RCPs) in the United States and the outcomes being achieved by those operating in Canada to determine whether and how these partnerships can support whole-landscape approaches to strengthen and accelerate conservation outcomes. Regional partnership models are particularly relevant for the southern regions of Canada, where a high percentage of land is owned privately or by community-based conservation organizations, often operating in the same, or overlapping, areas. This paper examines the gaps and challenges in forming and maintaining RCPs that need to be addressed and the characteristics of success that should be supported. It also suggests an expansion of the model to directly include climate goals by referring to the partnerships as Regional Conservation and Climate Partnerships (RCCPs). The findings and recommendations affirm that RCCPs should be further investigated for wider application in Canada, with a view to fostering their establishment and development, and significantly expanding their geographic reach and impact.

The full paper can be read on the Lincoln Institute’s website, here.