The North American West contains some of our country's greatest natural treasures and last remaining wild landscapes. It is a region characterized by diversity—biological, cultural, and ethnic. But this diverse set of resources is increasingly under siege; the West as we know it is facing some of the most significant threats the region has ever faced. Explosive population growth has put even more stress on already fragile and often antiquated land and water management systems. Continued broad-scale development and energy and mineral production exacerbate these stresses. The West is transforming before our eyes and the direction of this transformation is not sustainable.

In addition to these dynamics, the region is facing its most significant threat: climate change. The West will likely experience more pronounced impacts from climate change than any other part of the continent except for the Arctic. Water in particular, which has always been a limiting factor in the region, will become increasingly scarce as competition for its uses intensifies. Building resilience of the conservation infrastructure to withstand the impacts of climate change is an overarching goal that cuts across all of our strategies.

We are clearly in a period of transformative change for the West. Throughout much of the region, the effect of the changes is likely to be a further degradation of the region's natural resources and iconic landscapes and a growing cultural separation of people from the landscape. Despite the scale of change that will take place over the next decades, there are still a number of opportunities to achieve conservation outcomes.

Subprogram Goal
The Western Conservation subprogram was created with the goal of protecting and restoring biologically important and iconic regions of Western North America in ways which help create sustainable communities and build broader and more effective conservation constituencies.

Subprogram Strategy
The subprogram's core grantmaking strategy has three elements:

1. Western Land Protection. Continuing the long tradition of land conservation at the Foundation, the subprogram will support major initiatives designed to permanently protect some of the most ecologically and culturally important public and private lands in the West. Specifically, we will focus on both private and public land protection opportunities in:

• California: Sierra Nevada and Central Valley regions
• Colorado Plateau: Southern Utah and Colorado, and Northern Arizona and New Mexico
• Northwest Mexico: Focus on fragile coastal landscapes

These three regions were chosen as the highest priority areas of investment based upon three primary criteria: (1) our historical and current work within the geography (California and Gulf of California); (2) the ability of philanthropic investment to leverage new public or private funds for conservation work; and (3) the opportunity for significant conservation outcomes in the next five years. However, with an understanding of the interconnected dynamics of federal policy and the overarching capacity needs and opportunities in the region, we will also target a limited number of West-wide strategies, which will include opportunities to protect some of the West's most special places and strengthen the key elements of the broader conservation movement.

2. Western Watershed Restoration. The West has one of the largest and most complex systems of water infrastructure (dams, levees, canals, pipelines) in the world. Unfortunately, these water management systems and the rivers upon which they depend have reached their breaking points. The subprogram will support projects that restore degraded river and water systems and reconnect these natural corridors to local communities through new public and private partnerships. We have chosen two of the largest river systems in the West on which to focus our investments:

• California's Bay-Delta
• The Colorado River Basin

3. Strengthening Resilience through Adaptive Climate Change Management and Broadening Environmental Constituencies. The West is undergoing a series of major transformations in climate, demographics and attitudes toward the environment. To address these challenges, the subprogram will look to support projects that focus specifically on some of the most important areas of change in the West, including:

• Transforming land and water management systems to address the impact of climate change.
• Expanding the breadth and depth of the conservation movement by supporting and strengthening emerging, non-traditional, or traditional organizations working on environmental issues. We are particularly interested in supporting organizations that combine efforts to protect and promote both biological and cultural conservation.
• Expanding the capacity and the efficacy of the land trust movement.

While we may have west-wide components of this work (e.g., the land trust movement), the vast majority of our grants will be focused in the same geographic areas we have identified in our land and water protection work (see above).

Partnership with the Resources Legacy Fund
The Western Conservation strategy was developed in close collaboration with the Resources Legacy Fund (RLF). RLF will conduct the grantmaking for several elements of our work:

1. Western Land Protection

2. Western Watershed Restoration

3. Strengthening Resilience