The original ALUS model motivated agricultural producers to produce natural capital on their land. Bryan’s leadership shifted it from a small funder-incubated organization, incentivizing farmers to produce ecosystem services, to one that gives real choice, power and market opportunity for farmers and ranchers to reposition their role to be on the front lines in the fight against climate change. It also ensures that companies that help to fund this work are given in return bundled biodiversity credits to meet their corporate sustainability goals. Bryan sustains and scales this new cross-sector climate solutions network in three ways. First is a place-based process for recruiting and kickstarting farmer- and rancher-initiated projects that is aligned with local conservation priorities. Second is building a nationwide network of funders to ensure capital flow to farmers and ranchers and offering bundled biodiversity credits to companies in return. And third is strengthening partnerships with local and federal government agencies to influence their own practices.
ALUS originally conceptualized support to participant farmers through a stewardship council. Bryan reimagined it to become what he now calls Partnership Advisory Committees, a governance unit within each community. These support farmers and ranchers with training, funding, education, networking, and technical support. Each committee makes decisions on the viability of a proposed ecosystem project and payment amounts. It also provides technical support. They are farmer- and rancher-driven (they make up at least 50% of each committee), with other members drawn from government, conservation organizations, regional knowledge holders, funders and ALUS staff. Each Committee decides how much land area it will cover, and in its first year, demonstration farms are set up so that people can join tours to learn more when they are ready. Projects that follow are reviewed and funded annually.
Bryan’s approach emphasizes the farmer as the first decision-maker on a project and the amount of land needed to implement it. The initial 5-year funding approved by a Partnership Advisory Committee allows the farmer to decide how they want to engage, and farmer contracts are renewable. In 2021, Bryan saw that 76% farmers returned after their first year to do a second project. He says it is common amongst farmers to be wary of new initiatives like ALUS, given their long-held suspicion of government or outsiders’ programs that could limit their production and profit-making. Bryan’s approach takes this context into account and has proven successful in building trust, in no small part because farmers and ranchers are at each Committee’s core. ALUS has seen consistent growth as a result. Some 38 Partnership Advisory Committees are now active across six provinces – 12 more than when Bryan attended the virtual panel in July 2021. 32 are consulted about ALUS policy changes nationally. They support local mapping, data collection, and project management. They drive farmer participation and are excellent fundraising engines of their own. And these Committees have raised 40% of ALUS’ annual budget through local fundraising, showing the deep trust and credibility they have with community stakeholders.
Bryan’s second strategy is growing a national network of funders who can increase capital flowing to farmers. In the last five years alone, he has brought on more than 30 private-sector partners such as Cargill, General Mills, A&W, Danone, Royal Bank of Canada and TD Bank. And by branding the corporate effort as “the New Acre Project,” he has created a means by which private sector support for farmer-led ecosystem services can be reflected tangibly. For each ‘acre of outcome’ a company invests in, it receives a bundled biodiversity credit aligned to the new natural capital that farmers’ projects are building. This work is now at an inflection point, given a recent CAD$5M (US$3.7M) grant from Sustainable Development Technology Canada to develop a platform for the quantification of carbon sequestered and offset by farmer projects. Cargill and Bruce Power will co-create the platform. And the federal government is taking notice. At the time of writing (early March 2023), Bryan and colleagues are attending meetings with government officials from four national departments to discuss the new platform and how its carbon quantification as a subset of the biodiversity bundles improves on current offsetting practices. Bryan expects that ALUS will be able to start issuing its own carbon credits as a token attached to the New Acre in the next 18 months.
Bryan builds on the confidence amongst private funders by drawing on insurance sector best practice to create an inventive new way to verify projects continue to exist. Rather than visit each farm, which would demand a great deal of time and resources, Bryan uses a ‘random sampling’ approach to ensure that farmers’ projects are still active. Partners in academia and the innovation sector help to verify findings. This certification process has earned the confidence of existing corporate partners who are willing to pay more than conventional carbon offsets per ton because the projects’ impact is both environmental and social. ALUS has also started to explore the use of topography data gathered from satellites and AI to calculate how much carbon is likely sequestered by the trees and grassland on a given farmer’s land. This work builds upon project verification by interpreting the ecosystem services produced on project sites.
Bryan provides value for a range of local, provincial and national government entities. This is his third strategy. He has chosen these partners carefully, reaching out to Ministries of Environment and Climate, for instance, rather than Agriculture, and found that the ALUS model he created has applications beyond farms and ranch land. For example, Bryan has partnered with officials from municipalities who discovered that their roads were being washed away because of climate change in order to position farmers and ranchers as part of the solution. These municipalities are also eager to make their cities more liveable.
Anyone who encounters ALUS feels valued and trusted to contribute tangibly to improve shared outcomes. This is key to Bryan’s scaling strategy. And the impact speaks for itself. From 2015, he has grown ALUS from eight communities in three provinces to 38 communities across six, many of which have had the biggest loss of natural habitat due to growth and extreme weather events. These Partnership Advisory Committees are building new climate solutions networks with more than 1,600 farmers and ranchers at their core. More than 31,000 acres of wetland ecosystems and 28,000 acres of new pollinator habitats have been built, which is 5,400 and 5,000 more than just last year, respectively. And some 8,000 acres have been reforested with native trees and shrubs. Many of the projects’ impact has been analyzed and verified by experts at the University of Guelph and Université du Québec en Outaouais, as well as by those at Alberta Agriculture and Forestry and InnoTech Alberta. Open-sourced knowledge products such as ALUS Guidebooks and Aquatic Species Infosheets ensure Partnership Advisory Committees’ learnings are available for more farmers and ranchers who might be interested in joining the effort. ALUS has also scaled recently to the US states of Iowa and Ohio, and Bryan has started conversations with stakeholders in Namibia and Ghana.
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