Mount Grace’s Climate Leadership Featured in New Lincoln Institute Working Paper
Conservation helps sustain local communities, protect biodiversity, and, as climate pressures intensify across the region, serve as a powerful natural solution for climate mitigation and adaptation.
It’s through that lens that Mount Grace has made a concerted effort to address climate change, biodiversity loss, and land justice. In a working paper published by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy this past April, titled A Roadmap for Land Trusts to Contribute to Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation, Dr. Jenn Albertine, Mount Grace’s Climate & Land Justice Director, outlines how land trusts can play a stronger role in addressing the climate crisis through conservation, stewardship, and community engagement.
“Land trusts are on the frontline of the climate crisis,” says Jenn Albertine. “Every day our applied work is either protecting more land from degradation or caring for the land to make sure that it remains resilient to the current and coming challenges caused by a rapidly changing climate.”
Land trusts are on the frontline of the climate crisis.
We need the capacity to care for the land entrusted to us, while also working alongside our communities and following the leadership of Indigenous land stewards. The climate crisis is too big for any of us to solve alone.
“Our forests, wetlands, and rivers function like the lungs, kidneys, and arteries of a much larger living landscape,” says Emma Ellsworth, Executive Director of Mount Grace. “Each plays a vital role in storing carbon, supporting biodiversity, and building resilience to climate change. Conserving these natural systems requires us to think beyond individual properties and steward the broader landscape for the long term. This paper does an exceptional job of outlining how a regional land trust like ours can create meaningful impacts far beyond the landscapes and communities we serve.”
Mount Grace grounds its climate work in three guiding questions: how to steward land in ways that build ecological resilience, how to focus land conservation where it can support regional adaptation, and how to reduce its own contribution to greenhouse gas emissions. From energy-efficient office renovations and adoption of remote monitoring technology to our strategic conservation approach based on statewide biodiversity and resilience mapping, this paper highlights strategies Mount Grace has used in these three areas, explores lessons learned, and provides a glimpse of future actions to address the climate crisis.
- Conserving land, arguably the most important step Mount Grace can take to mitigate climate change.
- Created a Climate & Land Justice Department to integrate both climate change and land justice into the operations of Mount Grace.
- Basing its conservation decisions in part on state biodiversity and resilience mapping to ensure that it is prioritizing protection of lands most likely to adapt to changing climate and weather patterns.
- Protecting local farms and local sources of food, helping to ensure that the community will survive in the event of serious disturbance to the food system and to reduce the climate impact caused by reliance on long-distance transportation of food from farm to table.
- Participating and often playing a leadership role in Municipal Vulnerability Preparedness committees in multiple towns in the Mount Grace region (MA EOEEA 2024).
- Evolving our Stewardship practices to mitigate the effects of climate change including the proliferation of invasive species.
- This includes integrating remote monitoring by satellite imagery, giving the stewardship team a new, expanded perspective through professional development opportunities , increased capacity, and a reduced carbon footprint.
- Adjusting forest management plans to incorporate biodiversity and resilience as well as carbon storage and sequestration, while offering educational events about forest management.
- Renovations to minimize the carbon footprint of Mount Grace’s headquarters and serve as a model retrofit that could be emulated across the region. Features include mini-split installation, energy efficiency windows and lighting, insulation in attic and basement, solar panels, and electric vehicle chargers. Renovations reduced oil usage by 55-58% , bringing its heating emissions down from 9.2 MTCO2/yr to 5 MTCO2/yr.
- Construction of office space demonstrating affordable lower-carbon and energy-efficient materials and techniques.