Campaign for a Sustainable Planet - Mark Tercek on the Campaign

Get Involved

There are many ways you can support our Campaign for a Sustainable Planet. You can make a gift today with our safe and secure donation form or explore how you can create a legacy for the natural world while meeting your philanthropic and financial goals.

Go Deeper

Where We Work
Learn about our conservation work across the United States and in more than 30 countries around the world.

About The Nature Conservancy
Learn why The Nature Conservancy is the leading conservation organization working around the world to protect ecologically important lands and waters for nature and people.

Science at the Conservancy
Meet some of our more than 500 staff scientists and learn how everything The Nature Conservancy does is science-based.

By Mark Tercek

Despite the often-dire news about the environment, it is a very exciting time for the conservation of our natural world.

Why? Because conservation is moving from the sidelines of global priorities to the center of the world stage. Policymakers and citizens alike are coming to better understand the intricate connections among environmental health, natural diversity, our economies and human wellbeing.

And as a result, we are witnessing a sea change in how governments and business engage with nonprofits for the protection of nature.

The world's growing acceptance of the real threat of climate change, for instance, has created potential for unprecedented conservation partnership with the private and public sectors at a level unimagined before.

Emerging carbon markets and "natural capital" investments could help shepherd the substantial resources needed to safeguard tropical forests around the world.

No Better Time for the Campaign

The Campaign for a Sustainable Planet is The Nature Conservancy's effort to capitalize, inspire, expand and accelerate conservation of our land and water resources on a global scale. It is quite simply the most significant conservation effort of this generation.

This ambitious campaign seeks to double the amount of global lands and waters in protected status. Besides such site-specific work, the campaign will focus on strategies to confront issues such as climate change that require global and national policy movement as well as on-the-ground action.

This campaign is much bigger than the Conservancy. A key element is to "work with others," meaning other conservation organizations, local communities, local and national governments, international aid organizations — anyone or any institution whose goals overlap with the conservation of nature for the benefit of wildlife and people.

Partners at specific projects may range from WWF to the Northern Rangelands Trust in Kenya, from the United Nations Development Fund to the Army Corps of Engineers, from the government of Costa Rica to the village of Tarobi in Papua New Guinea. All sectors of society, big and small, have crucial roles to play.

The early phase of the campaign is focusing on testing new strategies that can then be reapplied elsewhere and expanded dramatically. For example, a water fund established with Conservancy help in Quito, Ecuador invests fees paid by water-users into community forest conservation efforts that protect the watershed and keep the water supply sustainable. That successful model is now being applied in watersheds for major cities throughout South America.

To leave a sustainable world for future generations, we need to dramatically expand the scope, scale and pace of conservation to levels that will truly make a difference. The Campaign for a Sustainable Planet gives us the plan and the impetus to achieve that goal; we only need the collective will of us all to succeed.

Mark Tercek is president and CEO of The Nature Conservancy.

Nature picture credits (top to bottom, left to right): Photo © Chris Helzer/TNC (Sandhill cranes flying along the Platte River, Nebraska); © Mark Godfrey/TNC (Mark Tercek).