Rio Grande Water Fund

The Nature Conservancy New Mexico (TNC NM) established the visionary Rio Grande Water Fund (RGWF) in 2014 as a public-private partnership to address overgrown forested watersheds in Northern New Mexico and resulting water scarcity downstream. The RGWF invests in projects that accelerate landscape-scale forest restoration through thinning, controlled burns, stream restoration, post-fire watershed restoration, restoration planning, education and outreach, and monitoring. Prior to RGWF’s inception, 3,000 forested acres were restored each year; since the RGWF launch in 2014, over 251,000 acres have been restored, including 33,000 in 2019. TNC NM has engaged over 80 partners, leveraging $5 million in private funding into $48 million of on-the-ground projects that integrate community values with the various management directions of federal, state, local and tribal governments. 

The Nature Conservancy North America adopted Living With Fire as a global organizational priority in 2018 to encourage ecological, socio-economic and technical fire management to meet the goal of sustainable ecosystems and livelihoods in fire-prone environments. The RGWF was selected as a Living With Fire Exemplary Project, and is being replicated to transform fire management across the country. TNC NM will share RGWF science, restoration and conservation success stories to address federal- and state-level fire and land management policies helping to transform reactive fire management systems to proactive systems that favor resiliency and adaptation.