Natural and working lands (NWLs) provide many benefits to people, including storing greenhouse gases (GHGs), supporting biodiversity, and generating other ecosystem services. Management of NWLs can influence their condition and function and therefore the benefits they provide. This project surveys the synthesis literature to assess how management actions on various types of NWLs affect biodiversity and GHG outcomes. This information can help to determine how to best manage these lands to contribute to both biodiversity and climate solutions in the United States.

The next phase of academic reforms must build toward the broad institutionalization of engaged scholarship, as demanded by students and the communities that surround and support universities. The Guidebook for the Engaged University gives the academy both a vision and a roadmap to a more impactful future, in which universities, including their scholars and staff, catalyze solutions for the world’s most pressing challenges.

This document from the Resilience Roadmap project recommends a common approach to developing key performance indicators (KPIs) for climate change adaptation and resilience planning, drawing upon current science and tools referenced throughout. The work is particularly aimed to support climate adaptation and resilience planning by US federal agencies and thus presents principally US national-level data and online resources. The approach is broadly applicable across agencies, sectors, and systems and can also be applied by state or local planners and adaptation/resilience practitioners.

Across the U.S., states are developing policies and programs to help promote forest-based natural climate solutions. This effort is bolstered by a growth in forest carbon programs that aim to make entry into the voluntary carbon offset market accessible to all landowners. Here we present a “menu” of policy and program options (that we call action items) derived from existing state programs and policies that decision makers can leverage to promote forest carbon solutions.

Natural and working lands (NWL) in the United States provide many benefits, including food, climate mitigation, recreational opportunities, jobs, and many more. There is currently no coordinated approach in the United States to track how provision of these benefits is changing over time. This project begins to fill this gap by identifying datasets that can be used to track the status and trends of NWL benefits (i.e., ecosystem services), assessing their readiness for use in the near-term, and highlighting data gaps and limitations that need to be addressed for a national assessment.

This chapter from Global Climate Change and Human Health: From Science to Practice discusses how various ecosystem services affect human health and describes how climate change might disrupt or alter the delivery of those services.

This Phase II report of the GEMS project identifies metrics available to monitor the social and economic outcomes of a wide variety of coastal projects funded in the Gulf, using ESLMs to illustrate how these projects’ impacts cascade through the biophysical system to result in social and economic outcomes. Phase II expands the focus to assess socioeconomic metrics for 16 coastal project types, including habitat restoration, recreational enhancement, and water quality improvement projects.

While we know that cross-sector thinking is essential, it is not commonplace. Delivering Bigger Change Faster: A Workbook on Strengthening Proposals for Projects With Cross-sector Impacts, Version 2.0 is a resource for teams that are fairly new to cross-sector thinking but already have a proposal for creating multi-sector impacts.

This paper focused on answering the questions: (1) How does the environmental footprint of cultured milk protein compare to that of traditional milk protein (derived from cows)? and (2) If there is a significant difference in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions between production of cultured and traditional milk protein, would developing carbon credits for cultured protein production be profitable for cultured protein producers?

Large landscape conservation planning often requires managers to coordinate with private landowners, especially in regions like the southern and western U.S. where private landownership dominates. It is often difficult to design conservation programs that incorporate varying landowner perceptions, values, and ownership objectives. Simple and transferable methods are needed to inform the design of landscape-scale conservation and restoration programs, and we propose that this can be done by targeting ecosystem services (ES) of interest to private landowners.