2024 Year in Review

Letter from Our State Director, Mauricia M.M. Baca

Dear Friends,

I am so grateful for an incredible year—The Nature Conservancy's (TNC) fortieth year of working together in Nevada.

It has been wonderful to celebrate across the state and look back on what we have accomplished together while also continuing to invest in our future.

I've been thinking about how conservation helps people and nature in both the short and long term, and how important it is to acknowledge how working with nature can take time. Some of the results will come in our lifetimes, and some will come in the lives of future generations, just as we have benefited from the hard work of those who came before us.

Our success in Nevada has been driven by visionaries who looked at the long-term view, from the group of conservationists who fought to protect Ash Meadows in 1984, to our partners who helped us return 11 miles of the Truckee River to its natural curves, to our leadership who worked with corporate partners to protect the gorgeous view of Red Rock Canyon for all to enjoy today.

To meet our ambitious 2030 goals, we're going to have to step up and work even more closely together to meet the challenge. I know we can meet these challenges, but we can't do it alone. We will have to work across landscapes and watersheds and on a bigger scale than we ever have before, because climate change and biodiversity loss don't stop at state borders or property boundaries. And we have to recognize that we aren't just planning for our own future, but for the generations of people and nature after us.

I am excited to share some inspiring examples of projects like this in our annual report. What was a burn scar in central Nevada a decade ago is now a thriving wet meadow. The restoration happened thanks to an innovative conservation agreement with Nevada Gold Mines made in 2014. It's helping to restore some of the most important areas in an 880,000-acre landscape. Already, greater sage-grouse and pronghorn have returned to these areas. Over the past five years, we have mapped Nevada's groundwater-dependent ecosystems, identified the stressors and threats they face, and come up with 10 strategies to protect them in the future. Our science team has mapped where species will move as the climate becomes hotter and drier so that we can better protect their future habitats. On the policy side, we're advocating for conservation funding and for smart-from-the-start policies and responsible lithium mining so that we can help Nevada have a clean energy future while also protecting our state's incredible biodiversity. And we can't do any of it without our staff—we're growing our team to keep meeting these landscape-scale challenges.

Thank you for all of your support—you are helping people and nature thrive in Nevada now and into the future.