Environment & Sustainability

In its Environment and Sustainability grantmaking, the Compton Foundation supports responsible stewardship that respects the rights of future generations to a balanced and healthy ecology. The Foundation believes it is possible to pursue a holistic and sustainable vision that blends concern for the environment with economic viability, links urban and rural priorities, and views humans as one part of the natural world. In 2008 and 2009, the Environment program awarded grants in the areas of Fresh Water, Rural Sustainability, and Climate Change.

Fresh Water

The Compton Foundation supports efforts to care for fresh water, advancing visions for shared water stewardship that maximize human and ecological well-being, and promoting fair and transparent means for making decisions about how water is used.

Ceres is a national network of investors, environmental organizations, and public interest groups working with businesses to address global sustainability challenges. The organization aims to integrate sustainability into capital markets in order to improve the health of the planet and its people. Many regions are rapidly moving into an era of 'peak water,' characterized by diminishing supplies of fresh water coupled with unprecedented and growing water demand. With funding from the Compton Foundation, Ceres is empowering its investor network to act on the issue of water risk, educating companies about how to evaluate water risk and advancing corporate transparency.

The current pace and scale of river and stream restoration is far too limited to truly address freshwater ecosystem health. In partnership with the Compton Foundation, The Freshwater Trust is developing StreamBank, a web-based tool that can accelerate the funding, permitting, implementing, and monitoring of stream restoration projects without sacrificing project quality. StreamBank provides local landowners and restoration professionals a one-stop shop to implement a project as efficiently as possible. This new tool is particularly important as pressure on water resources from climate change and population growth continues to mount, and as a method of advancing 'green jobs' in often struggling local communities as part of restoration-based economic development.

While beaver are not an endangered species in the West, due to long histories of trapping and ecosystem degradation they are so reduced in number that they are functionally absent from most western streams. Beaver dams can store water, extending stream flows through all seasons; capture and store sediment, healing degraded stream banks; and create new aquatic and riparian habitat, all of which mitigate the local impacts of climate change in fresh water systems. With a grant from the Compton Foundation, the Grand Canyon Trust aims to provide rural outreach and economic analysis that will help the State of Utah successfully implement the first state beaver management plan in the West.

Rural Sustainability

Some believe that rural communities must choose between economic and environmental health. The Compton Foundation believes that both are possible, and that collaborations between diverse interests are integral to local and regional sustainability.

The Ecosystem Workforce Program (EWP) at the University of Oregon is built on the fundamental belief that ecology, economy, and governance are intimately interconnected. EWP was founded in 1994 to support the development of a high-skill, high-wage ecosystem management industry in the Pacific Northwest. Since that time, the program has fostered sustainable development in rural communities by developing restoration workforce trainings and supporting local quality jobs programs in forest communities. With Compton funding, EWP will focus on rural climate change policy, disseminating critical research about the economic opportunities of rural green jobs and advocating to accelerate climate change mitigation.

Ranchers, environmentalists, and resource professionals from federal and state agencies founded the California Rangeland Conservation Coalition in the fall of 2006 to support ranchers around the Central Valley and the critical habitat they manage. Defenders of Wildlife and the California Cattlemen's Association staff the Coalition. With Compton support, Defenders of Wildlife will analyze the potential for ecosystem services markets to support ranch land conservation. This project will explore a water quality trading program that could expand the incentives for sustainable ranch stewardship in the Central Valley while protecting riparian ecosystems.

With funding from the Compton Foundation, Western Rivers Conservancy (WRC) is partnering with the Yurok Tribe to conserve the watershed of a vital tributary to the lower Klamath River in California. WRC and the Yurok have established an agreement to work together to buy 47,000 acres along Blue Creek from the Green Diamond Resource Company. The Yurok plan to manage 22,000 acres for sustainable forestry as a steady source of income to support services for tribal members and to pay off the purchase of the forestry lands. The Yurok will also establish a 25,000-acre tribal park and salmon sanctuary. This project presents an opportunity to simultaneously support the restoration of the once-great salmon runs of the Klamath River and re-establish a homeland and economic base for the Yurok Tribe.

Climate Change

Compton funding supports efforts to ensure that implementation of California's Global Warming Solutions Act (AB 32) is effective and politically successful; to advance a new energy economy in the western United States with particular focus on renewables, efficiency, and both urban and rural green jobs; and to promote analysis of the climate/water nexus.

Vote Solar aims to combat global climate change and foster economic opportunity by bringing solar into US mainstream energy markets. Solar is the fastest growing energy source in the world, but the US has just scratched the surface of solar's vast energy potential. In order to bring the technology to scale, costs must come down. With Compton support, Vote Solar will work to build the necessary economies of scale. In California, its work with the Public Utility Commission has proven hugely successful in catalyzing utility programs that decrease the cost of installing solar and encourage consumer investment, helping to establish the foundations for a strong new energy market. Vote Solar plans to use its California experience as a model for replication from coast to coast; Compton funding will support its efforts in the western states of Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Nevada.

Western Resource Advocates was one of the first organizations in the West to address the critical interplay between water and energy. The fields have historically operated independently, so it is enormously challenging to urge planners, regulators, and industry to consider integrated analysis. Nevertheless, such integration offers the potential for huge gains. Not only do choices about water and energy development have serious consequences for both greenhouse gas emissions and fresh water ecology, but also there is a real opportunity to learn across fields about the tools for managing each resource. Funded by Compton, Western Resource Advocates will analyze the energy savings available with 'smart' water management in major western cities, as well as producing new case studies that demonstrate the benefits of water-efficient over water-intensive renewable energy. Ultimately, the organization hopes to protect critical western rivers and water resources and to encourage renewable energy development most appropriate for an arid ecology.

To catalyze creative responses to the complex issue of climate change, Cape Farewell takes preeminent artists and scientists on expeditions to provide new material for their imaginative processes. The organization visits the world's climate tipping points and explores the most current scientific findings on climate change to inspire artistic endeavor. In 2009, with Compton support and in partnership with the Environmental Change Institute of Oxford, Cape Farewell focused on a Peruvian transect from the Andes glaciers to the Amazon rainforest. The trip highlighted the water shortages glacial melt is bringing to the region and the major changes the rainforest is already experiencing due to shifts in local temperature and precipitation. Ideally, the art pieces produced by trip participants will eventually help to generate a cultural shift, connecting wide audiences to the challenges and opportunities offered by climate change.