Ecosystem Services
The Bullitt Foundation’s Ecosystem Services program views biodiversity conservation through a human lens. It favors projects that lie at the interface of human communities and the natural world. It seeks to advance needed innovations in the management of land, air, and water if the Pacific Northwest is to serve as a model of sustainability for the world, and to thrive as a place for its citizens to live and work.
Program Objective: We will restore and protect the ability of northwest ecosystems to sustain healthy, vibrant human communities and a sound economy.
The Bullitt Foundation’s Ecosystem Services program targets investments toward organizations and activities that seek to restore and protect the ability of Pacific Northwest ecosystems to provide the products and services needed to sustain human communities. It seeks to illuminate and strengthen the clear links between healthy ecosystems on the one hand, and vibrant human systems on the other.
Unfortunately, these linkages are not well understood by most policymakers, or by the public they serve. Ecosystem services include more than the obvious things – the products we obtain from natural ecosystems. They also include the fundamental life support services provided by them: purification of air, regulation of water flows, detoxification and decomposition of wastes, regeneration of soil fertility, pollination of food crops, and production and maintenance of biodiversity from which we derive the raw materials on which our economies and communities are built.
The Bullitt Foundation’s Ecosystem Services program views biodiversity conservation through a human lens. It favors projects that lie at the interface of human communities and the natural world. It seeks to advance needed innovations in the management of land, air, and water if the Pacific Northwest is to serve as a model of sustainability for the world, and to thrive as a place for its citizens to live and work. It acknowledges climate change as a major additional stress on ecosystems, and it supports efforts to shape the manner in which we prepare for inevitable climate change impacts. It overlaps substantially and intentionally with the Foundation’s other programs.
Program priorities:
- Manage freshwater resources: control, use, distribution, and conservation.
- Conserve and restore resilient watersheds, wetlands and estuaries.
- Maintain a working land base for sustainable agriculture and forestry.
- Enforce laws and policies intended to assure air and water quality.
- Preserve and steward open space, parks, and associated native biodiversity in the context of human communities.
- Create landowner incentives for maintaining and enhancing ecosystem services, including the development of market-based mechanisms.
