OSI: Land and Climate Catalyst Planning Grants

Land and Climate Grant Program

Across the country, communities and ecosystems are experiencing climate change and grappling with its unknowns. How much will temperatures rise and how quickly? How will these changes impact the forests, streams, and wildlife we protect?

Despite this uncertainty, scientists agree: land protection is, and will remain, a key strategy for ensuring that natural systems — and the plants, animals, and people that depend upon them — can continue to thrive.

Since 2012, OSI has been helping land trusts and other groups that protect and steward land develop effective approaches to conserving land in a rapidly changing climate. Working alongside our capital grants program that funds the acquisition of land that is resilient and stores and sequesters carbon, OSI has supported the development of over 70 climate-aligned conservation plans and offered workshops, webinars, and trainings to over 6,000 participants.

OSI’s Catalyst Program currently focuses on addressing the following climate issues: habitat resilience, forest carbon storage and sequestration, and community resilience to climate impacts such as flooding. We support conservation groups and communities by offering planning grants and technical assistance, authoring guidance documents, and hosting workshops.

Land and Climate Catalyst Planning Grants

Through a collaboration between Open Space Institute and Land Trust Alliance, $300,000 is available in the 2023 grant round to help land trusts, other not-for-profit organizations, and state and federally recognized Tribes integrate climate science into strategic land protection plans or forest stewardship plans.