COUNTING ON THE ENVIRONMENT

Partnership Services

We provide technical assistance, consulting, and other services that are mission-driven and designed to help communities build their own capacity to improve conservation outcomes. All of the services we provide accommodate multiple levels of engagement: we can get you started, advise you along the way, help catalyze action, or lead on program scoping through design and operation.

Ecosystem Accounting

Create tools, programs, and processes to track and communicate the benefits of conservation

Land managers tend and restore ecosystems every day. The challenge is communicating these benefits in terms other people can understand and invest in. Willamette Partnership has over a decade of experience helping communities quantify environmental benefits, connect those benefits to different forms of investment, and track how conservation programs make progress toward meeting their goals.

Our ecosystem accounting service area can help:

• Develop transparent and credible methods for quantifying and tracking ecosystem services;
• Design of market-based and incentives programs to improve conservation outcomes;
• Synthesize, translate, and apply science to address management and policy needs; and
• Report the conservation outcomes for regulatory or incentive programs.

Building Capacity

Build the capacity to solve complex conservation problems

Based on an assessment of community needs, we can help bring a collaborative group to consensus in identifying or working toward goals, play an advisory role in developing a market-based conservation program, help build new science and policy tools, or identify new ways to use existing policies.

Our building capacity services can help:

• Facilitate collaborative processes and build consensus;
• Build cross-sector teams that link conservation, human health, and economy;
• Train, guide, and organize support for quantifying ecosystem services and building and operating market-based programs in person or via the web; and
• Analyze policy and develop innovative policy tools and concepts.

Market Operations

Ensure rigorous management of environmental credit trading markets and incentives programs for conservation outcomes

Once an environmental market or incentives program is designed, someone needs to manage, operate, and adapt the program for its success. Willamette Partnership manages both market-based and incentives programs and can help build the capacity of local stakeholders to fill program management roles.

Our market operations services can help:

• Design sustainable business models, standard operating procedures, and governance structures for transparent and credible program administration;
• Provide training and accreditation for managers and verifiers of environmental market and incentives programs;
• Provide oversight and audit services for program management, verification, and tracking and accounting systems; and
• Develop and support systems for program evaluation and adaptive management.