From Seed to Scale: Five Conservation Solutions That Started as Wild Ideas

Late in the 20^th century, Quito, Ecuador, grew into a metropolis of more than 1.3 million people. As it expanded, myriad impacts rippled throughout the region, even lofting up to the mist-shrouded landscape high above the sprawling city.

Above Quito sit the páramos, high-altitude wetlands home to condors, Andean bears and pumas. Healthy páramos, which soak up water and slowly release it into waterways, have long been key to Quito’s water security.

But by the mid 1990s, these natural water factories were becoming degraded. The once-spongy soil, eroded and compacted by ranching and farming, was losing its ability to store and filter water. Quito’s water supply was at risk.

At the time, water conservation was primarily a topic for scientists and academics; decision-makers for a city were likely to look to gray (built) infrastructure for answers. But Roberto Troya, then director of TNC in Ecuador, saw nature as a key solution.

Troya and a team of TNC scientists worked alongside the local community and stakeholders to develop the concept of a water fund. The idea was that a region could secure its water supply if its many users came together to invest in the upstream watershed’s ongoing conservation and management.

In January 2000, TNC and Quito’s water utility, with $21,000 in seed money, established the Quito Water Fund, known locally as FONAG. Soon, several major water users joined the fund, and success started trickling in.

How it’s scaling

Twenty-six years later, FONAG is investing $4 million a year in watershed conservation, funding efforts to restore grasslands and protect key ecosystems for the water supply, such as páramos.

Biodiversity is returning to these unique ecosystems. Quito’s water is seeing gains in quality, quantity and availability during the dry season, and the city is saving money; estimates show that every dollar FONAG spends on conservation returns $2.15 in savings.

The pilot in Quito has inspired more than 50 watershed investment programs across 25 countries. In places like São Paulo, Bogotá, Nairobi, New Mexico and Norfolk, England, the basic concept of Quito lives on but is adapted for each watershed’s unique challenges.

To scale this work further, TNC developed tools and programs, like Nature for Water, to help communities and governments launch their own watershed investment programs and learn from each other.

Even the fund that started it all is learning from younger programs. Established 18 years after Quito, South Africa’s Greater Cape Town Water Fund has worked to clear hundreds of square miles of water-guzzling invasive plants. Now Quito is implementing invasive-clearing strategies it learned from Cape Town.

In 1999, Rod Salm put on his scuba mask and prepared to see more death.

The strong El Niño of 1997-1998, the most intense on record at the time and a haunting preview of more frequent and severe marine heatwaves driven by climate change, had caused the greatest coral die-off and bleaching event to date.

Salm, then the new director of TNC’s Asia-Pacific Marine Program, was touring TNC marine protected areas across the Pacific to catalog the destruction.

Off the coast of Palau, a strong current swept Salm past dead barrier reefs to some shallow reefs that were, to his surprise, alive.

He hypothesized that the strong current, as well as upwellings, might have aided the coral through the bleaching event. Salm’s observations helped inform the first formal international protocol for identifying resilient reefs.

In 2001, Salm gathered a small group of researchers in Hawai’i. For days, the group brainstormed how to help reefs survive the bleaching events of the future.

TNC’s present day Global Ocean Director, Elizabeth McLeod, was one of the researchers who took part in the exercise. “There were literally pieces of paper all over the floor filled with ideas,” shares McLeod.

How it’s scaling

Those papers didn’t stay on the floor. They became the basis for the Reef Resilience Network, a TNC-led program that has advanced coral reef science and trained more than 61,000 marine practitioners around the world to effectively manage reefs and critical marine areas.

Today, breakthrough technologies and radical partnerships are helping TNC and other organizations scale actions that boost coral resilience in a world that keeps warming.

As part of a project known as Super Reefs, TNC, Stanford University and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution are using 3D hydrodynamic modeling and genetics analysis to better identify and protect heat-resilient corals.

Meanwhile, in Raja Ampat, Indonesia, TNC’s country partner YKAN is integrating thermal testing, spatial planning and wastewater management into a comprehensive portfolio of resilience-based strategies to protect one of the most biodiverse marine ecosystems on the planet.

Across three coral innovation hubs—in the Bahamas, U.S. Virgin Islands and the Dominican Republic—teams are learning how to breed, raise and outplant corals faster, cost-effectively and at greater survival rates.

And in the spirit of Salm and the Reef Resilience Network, every advancement is being shared with speed and glee, so that coral can thrive through the challenging years ahead.

By the mid-2000s, the Republic of Seychelles had significant challenges servicing the nation’s foreign exchange debt. The 2008 global financial and banking crisis made the situation dire in terms of Seychelles’ ability to repay that debt.

An archipelago of 115 islands across a total ocean area of 1.35 million sq km in the Western Indian Ocean, Seychelles is home to numerous marine ecosystems, including coral reefs, seamounts, underwater canyons and lagoons that harbor rich biodiversity. These waters underpin the Seychellois way of life and an economy heavily based in fishing and tourism.

Seychelles understood the need to further conserve its marine resources and prepare for a rapidly warming world. In 2012, the government pledged to protect 30% of its marine territory and 50% of terrestrial areas.

In the nation’s conservation ambition, biodiversity protection goals and financial outlook, TNC and Seychelles saw the ingredients for a potential solution. It would involve combining a debt conversion with marine conservation and climate adaptation goals.

In 2016, the Seychelles government signed an agreement with TNC that refinanced $21.6 million of its debt, becoming the world’s first ocean debt conversion, unlocking long-term funding for marine conservation, climate adaptation and sustainable development of its marine-based economy.

The project established an independent conservation trust fund, Seychelles Conservation and Climate Adaptation Trust (SeyCCAT), to manage the funds from the debt conversion, grow the endowment, and ensure transparency and accountability of both the funding and conservation work.

How it’s scaling

Ten years in, SeyCCAT has funded dozens of locally implemented conservation efforts across Seychelles. And just last year, the nation signed into law its legally enforceable and actionable marine spatial plan, putting its best foot forward for a sustainable and resilient marine future.

Seychelles’ pioneering effort has inspired some of the world’s largest conservation initiatives, through what is now known as TNC’s Nature Bonds Program. The Nature Bonds model brings together debt refinancing, national conservation commitments, technical support and independent conservation trust funds to see the long-term work through.

Learnings from the initial experience in Seychelles have guided new marine projects in Belize (2021), Barbados (2022), Gabon (2023) and The Bahamas (2025). In 2025, in the Ecuadorian Amazon, the model was applied for the first time for land and freshwater conservation.

Together, these six projects are expected to unlock $1 billion in funding for conservation and climate action, supporting governments to achieve new protection or improved management of approximately 242 million hectares of ocean, land, lakes, and wetlands, as well as 18,000 km of rivers.

With this innovative finance mechanism, conservation is improving for the long-haul: working at the scale of seascapes and landscapes, belonging to and sustained by individual nations, and designed to endure.

This approach is still expanding. What started in Seychelles is seeding a new generation of projects through a unique collaboration, the Debt for Nature Coalition, which TNC founded alongside six fellow NGOs.

The time to hesitate was through. It was 1962, and Donald Lawrence, a botanist with the University of Minnesota, was performing a controlled burn to prove that fire could heal the landscape.

He was simultaneously years ahead of much of the conservation world, millennia behind Indigenous stewardship traditions (and five years ahead of The Doors, who wouldn’t release Light My Fire until 1967).

For decades, policies across the U.S. kept fire suppressed—a well-intentioned strategy which deprived fire-adapted landscapes of an essential change agent and made wildfires more destructive for communities and ecosystems alike.

Lawrence’s demonstration proved its point: the carefully set fire had benefited the savanna. TNC, with its portfolio of preserves and its commitment to advancing science, could play a unique role in changing the fire culture of the day. Over the decades, more TNC preserves included fire as a stewardship tool, and more staff developed controlled burn expertise.

For the benefits and practices of good fire to spread, it couldn’t just happen on our preserves. In the 1980s and 1990s, TNC grew its partnership with state and federal agencies and assisted in fire management strategies across public lands. In 2002, TNC, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Department of the Interior formed a peer learning group called the Fire Learning Network (FLN).

How it’s scaling

Over decades, the network grew and evolved. As more people from different regions and backgrounds joined the network, expanding its footprint to more than 371 million acres today, they brought diverse perspectives that pushed fire practices forward. Soon, the original foundation in ecology expanded to include the human element: cultural values, social openness to proactive fire and community adaptation.

In 2008, TNC launched the Prescribed Fire Training Exchange (TREX) to provide on-the-ground training opportunities. More than 180 TREX events have trained thousands of fire practitioners (including 1,172 in 2025 alone) in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Colombia, Portugal, Spain, South Africa and Australia.

In 2012, 50 years after Lawrence’s burn, TNC helped another savanna, this time in northern Australia, reintroduce fire. This Indigenous-led restoration now covers more than 92,000 square miles.

In 2015, TNC and Indigenous leaders launched the Indigenous Peoples Burning Network, which centers on revitalizing traditional fire cultures. In 2025, it brought together practitioners and elders from 23 tribal communities.

Today, TNC still leads hundreds of burns, but the best indicator of success might be in what we are doing less. In the early days of FLN, TNC staff led all collaboratives. But as the network has grown, we’re proud to report that we manage only half of the activities. Local partners are helping light the way.

Don’t let its gentle rises and peaceful fields fool you: this stretch of eastern Kentucky is the site of an almost unbelievably powerful transformation.

Over several decades, mining companies used heavy explosives and machinery to remove the tops from the area’s mountains to access rich coal reserves.

This is the site of Starfire—one of the largest coal mines in southern Appalachia. At its peak, Starfire extracted 3 million tons of coal in a year and employed nearly 300 people. While still operating today at low capacity, most of the mining jobs that once underpinned the local economy are gone.

With flat topography and proximity to transmission lines and other grid infrastructure, Starfire’s formerly mined sites create the perfect opportunity for another monumental transformation: a transition from mining coal to “mining the sun.”

In 2023, solar developer BrightNight announced plans to build a massive solar energy project across 7,000 acres of Starfire’s repurposed lands. Starfire could eventually have the capacity to generate 800 MW of renewable energy—enough to power half a million homes.

Building on a decade of working across the energy and policy worlds to advance solar energy on degraded sites like mines, TNC helped lay the groundwork for Mining the Sun at Starfire.

TNC partnered with electric vehicle manufacturer Rivian to develop a resource that helps companies bring purpose-driven principles into the energy buying process. This refined process, which strongly considers outcomes that benefit the climate, conservation and local communities, ultimately led to the selection of BrightNight as Starfire’s developer. The project could bring a new energy chapter for a region with a long and proud history of generating power.

How it’s scaling

The concept of Mining the Sun continues to grow. We are working with our partners on plans for 14 solar and three battery storage projects across 360 acres of former mines in Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee.

These developments are the latest chapter in the Cumberland Forest Project, a TNC-led project that has prioritized conservation innovation, economic diversification and community engagement over decades.

To continue scaling, the right policies and incentives need to be in place. In 2025, TNC helped pass a state policy in Ohio that zones former mines for faster clean energy development. And in 2026, TNC advocated for a new law in Colorado that steers renewable energy onto former mines, landfills and other previously disturbed lands.

The principles of Mining the Sun are being put into practice far beyond the United States, too, like in Neyveli, India. In 2025, TNC partnered with NLC India Ltd. on a 50 MW pilot project on reclaimed mine land.

We’re now scaling the model by working with India’s National Institute for Solar Energy to develop a national roadmap for solar on closed coal mines.

With more legislation around the world (such as in the EU) recognizing Mining the Sun’s potential and with more solar projects in construction on former mines, the future is looking bright.