Ecosystem Services

Program Objective:  We will restore and protect the ability of northwest ecosystems to sustain healthy, vibrant human communities and a sound economy.

 The Ecosystems Services program makes grants to support efforts, based on sound science, to restore and protect ecosystems that provide goods and services to the region’s major metropolitan areas.

One consequence of such efforts will be to illuminate the links between healthy ecosystems and vibrant human communities.  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 conservation through a human lens. It favors bold projects that lie at the interface of human communities and the natural world. It seeks to advance innovations in the management of land, air, and water that will enable the citizens of the Pacific Northwest to live and work sustainably and serve as a model for others. It recognizes that market mechanisms, taxes, fees, subsidies, and public education can complement regulation as a policy tool. It acknowledges climate change as a major additional stress on ecosystems, and it overlaps substantially and intentionally with the Foundation’s other programs.

Program priorities:

Freshwater Resources

• Improve and reform water supply management policy and practice.
• Conserve and restore resilient watersheds, wetlands and estuaries.
• Prevent water pollution and safeguard the integrity of freshwater resources.

Biocarbon

• Reduce carbon dioxide releases from land-based sources.
• Increase the capture and sequestration of carbon dioxide in the urban, agricultural, and forest sectors.
• Ensure high levels of integrity in carbon measurement and accounting.

Open Space and Biodiversity

• Maintain a working land base for sustainable agriculture and forestry in or near urban areas.
• Preserve and steward open space, forests, and associated native biodiversity in the region’s major metropolitan regions.
• Encourage the use of natural processes in-lieu of traditional forms of urban infrastructure.