Nature-Friendly Communities

Habitat Protection And Land Use Planning

Chris Duerksen, Cara Snyder

• Publisher: Island Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781559638654, 9781559635936
• eBook ISBN: 9781610910149
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Nature-Friendly Communities presents an authoritative and readable overview of the successful approaches to protecting biodiversity and natural areas in America's growing communities. Addressing the crucial issues of sprawl, open space, and political realities, Chris Duerksen and Cara Snyder explain the most effective steps that communities can take to protect nature.

The book: documents the broad range of benefits, including economic impacts, resulting from comprehensive biodiversity protection efforts; identifies and disseminates information on replicable best community practices; establishes benchmarks for evaluating community biodiversity protection programs.

Nine comprehensive case studies of communities explain how nature protection programs have been implemented. From Austin and Baltimore to Tucson and Minneapolis, the authors explore how different cities and counties have taken bold steps to successfully protect natural areas. Examining program structure and administration, land acquisition strategies and sources of funding, habitat restoration programs, social impacts, education efforts, and overall results, these case studies lay out perfect examples that other communities can easily follow. Among the case study sites are Sanibel Island, Florida; Austin, Texas; Baltimore County, Maryland; Charlotte Harbor, Florida; and Teton County, Wyoming.

Nature-Friendly Communities offers a useful overview of the increasing number of communities that have established successful nature protection programs and the significant benefits those programs provide. It is an important new work for public officials, community activists, and anyone concerned with understanding or implementing local or regional biodiversity protection efforts.

CHAPTER 1

The Benefits of Nature Protection

Why would a community, especially elected officials, want to protect nature and natural resources? In these economic times, local governments find it difficult to make ends meet and to avoid budget overruns, much less provide more of what might be seen as a luxury to some people. However, along with the myriad intrinsic values people often place on nature, there are a host of economically important reasons for protecting natural resources and biodiversity. This chapter focuses on these benefits. Some are readily measured and well established, while the merits of others are just beginning to be recognized. Altogether, evidence continues to mount that protecting nature and promoting biodiversity make not just good sense but good dollars and cents.

For local or regional governments to seriously consider protecting nature, the bottom line must be considered. Will the costs outweigh the benefits? Can the community afford the investment? The short answer is that each community has a different set of circumstances, and ideally each community would evaluate its own overall goals, its economic realities, and its valuable characteristics. Some specific tools are available to evaluate a community’s economic situation and to gauge the benefits of nature protection programs to the community.

Often, protecting nature is an obvious good investment. Resort communities have known this for a long time. If you protect nature, more tourists will want to visit, stay longer, and spend more. Although many resort areas draw on public land outside their community’s boundaries, it can make financial sense to protect critical areas on private lands and ensure that visitors have a positive experience with nature within the local government boundaries as well. Of course, wildlife don’t read maps—they wander in and out of public lands. But what about the majority of communities around the nation that are nonresort communities? Even then, there are many economically compelling reasons for protecting nature.

Some examples of protecting nature as a good investment—to be discussed in more detail in this chapter—include lower infrastructure service costs, benefits of green infrastructure,¹ and increased property values. Studies of costs of facilities and infrastructure such as roads, schools, water/sewer, and emergency services have repeatedly shown that preserving open space can be more cost-effective than building a residential development on the same property. Recent experience has shown that the value of services provided by green infrastructure, such as stormwater filtration, may far outweigh the value of developing the land. Just as important, there is increasing proof that protecting natural resources is a vital factor in attracting and retaining businesses and jobs.

Americans have demonstrated that they endorse and will pay for protecting natural resources. There has been strong support for preservation of open space and habitat from voters nationwide as well as in surveys of the general public. We will delve into these topics more closely in the following pages, to remind communities why protecting nature is good for business and local economies and to give local officials the ammunition they need to make the case in persuading their colleagues and citizens to adopt effective protection strategies.

An initial decision and action to protect habitat may need to be followed by planning for future pressures on the protected area. When communities successfully preserve natural areas, that very success can increase the use of those areas, and degradation may become a pressing issue. Having mechanisms in place to prevent killing the golden goose can be just as vital as protecting the resource in the first place.

A final note: Although we focus here on the aspects of protecting nature that are most suited to quantification, as Pittsburgh mayor Tom Murphy observed at the 1999 symposium of the City Parks Forum,² “Parks and many cultural events should not be forced into this kind of economic analysis mold but should have value for their own purpose.”³ Natural areas have many undefinable benefits, and so protection efforts may lose out to more quantifiable services like highways and schools, but that does not mean communities should not value and protect natural areas.

Positive Economic Benefits

Growing evidence illustrates that nature-friendly communities can realize substantial economic benefits. From attracting and retaining employers and employees to bringing in potentially millions of tourist dollars, an investment in nature can provide measurable payoffs in the short and long term. The beauty of investing in biodiversity protection is that it provides long-lasting benefits and returns—it is not just a one-shot deal.

Attracting Businesses/Capital Investment

Study after study documents that preservation of natural resources and provision of open space are important factors in helping a region to retain existing jobs and businesses and to attract new ones. Quality-of-life matters and natural amenities are high on the list of quality-of-life ingredients. For example, the Center for the Continuing Study of the California Economy found that conservation of open space was critical for ensuring a higher quality of life, which the center documents as one of the most important components for attracting employers and employees to California communities. ⁴

Although quality of life is valuable in both rural and urban areas, the type of employers and their priorities may be slightly different in each area. Urban areas tend to draw more of the larger or high-tech companies, while rural areas tend to see more growth in small businesses.

Urban Areas

Today, there are more fast-growing entrepreneurial companies, more telecommuters, and less economic stability than in previous eras.⁵ The marketplace is global, and technology is key. Despite the failure of many dot-com start-up companies in 2000–2002, information technology is here to stay. This is the “new economy,” and there are implications for communities wishing to attract employers and employees alike, especially when it comes to quality of life.

High-technology companies treasure natural amenities and in national and local surveys have rated environmental quality ahead of housing costs, cost of living, commuting patterns, schools, climate, government services, and public safety in making location decisions.⁶ As Bill Calder, a spokesperson for computer chip manufacturer Intel, told the New York Times in the late 1990s, “Companies that can locate anywhere will go where they can attract good people in good places.”⁷ Many of the “good people” are creative, educated high-technology workers. And, increasingly, the “good places” are those that value and protect natural resources and open space, because those are the places where high-technology workers want to live.

A survey of more than 1,200 young high-technology workers found that “community quality of life” was the second most important factor in evaluating jobs after salary considerations, and more important than benefits, stock options, or company stability. Focus groups further revealed that young high-technology workers wanted easy access to a wide range of outdoor activities and a clean, healthy environment with a commitment to preserving natural resources for enjoyment and recreation. A vibrant music and performance scene with a wide range of live music opportunities and a wide range of nightlife experiences were also part of the perceived quality of life.⁸

Rural Areas

In rural America the situation is slightly different. Small businesses are even more crucial to rural economies. A 2003 study in the Greater Yellowstone region showed much higher growth rates in small businesses than in any other group—there were 2,781 new firms with fewer than five employees in the previous ten years.⁹ Nationally, small businesses create more jobs than large businesses.¹⁰ The types of small businesses vary from the low-wage service and trade sectors to high-end service providers in real estate and finance.¹¹ Preferences of small companies and their employees are thus a critical economic fact of life, and they place a high value on open space.

In one study, companies with fewer than 8 employees rated “quality of life” as their number one concern, while companies with more than 88 employees chose operating costs.¹² “Recreation/parks/open space” was the top quality-of-life element preferred by the small companies, with cos...

Table of contents

• About Island Press
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER 1 - The Benefits of Nature Protection
• CHAPTER 2 - Key Program Elements and Best Tools
• MAJOR CASE STUDIES
• FOCUSED CASE STUDIES
• Conclusion
• INDEX