Program Overview
Director: Joshua S. Reichert 2000: $52,180,000 / 44 grants The mission of the Environment program is to promote policies and practices that protect the global atmosphere and preserve old-growth forest, wilderness and marine ecosystems. Our work is highly goal-oriented, and virtually all of the activities we support contain well-defined benchmarks that enable us to measure progress toward meeting explicit targets.

Investing in focused public education initiatives constitutes one of our primary ways to encourage a more inclusive process in environmental decision-making. Accurate, scientifically based information about the causes, consequences and potential solutions to environmental problems not only increases public awareness, but also provides citizens with a broader base of knowledge with which to participate in critical environmental policy debates.

The organizations with which we work are widely representative of the American public, encompassing constituencies at the local, state, regional and national levels. In reaching out through our partners to such a broad base of citizens, we strive to bring diverse voices into the environmental debate and to enagage a wide range of different talents and skills in efforts to solve environmental problems.

Our work on climate change aims to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming. We support projects urging strong action by government and the private sector to take the steps necessary to reduce carbon dioxide emissions in this country and abroad. Through the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, we are investing in nonpartisan research to assess the environmental and economic impacts of global warming, to determine what constitutes a fair burden for developed and developing countries to assume in reducing greenhouse gases, to evaluate models that calculate the economic costs to the nation of mitigating greenhouse gases, and to encourage major corporations to take steps to reduce their emissions. In the last three years, the Center has released more than 25 highly publicized reports on climate-change policy, impacts and solutions. Together with its Business Environmental Leadership Council, a group of 28 companies worldwide that support action on climate change, the Center has been widely credited with changing the position of business on this issue in ways that have made a critical difference to the ongoing debate about global warming.

We have made significant investments toward strengthening the management of electric utilities in ways that increase the use of energy-efficient and renewable technologies. Since 1991, the Trusts and their partners have helped to promote $15.8 billion in energy-saving programs, which have reduced annual electric sales by about two percent nationwide. Finally, we have been very active in efforts to reduce harmful air emissions from the electricity sector, with particular emphasis on coal-fired power plants. Through the Clean Air Task Force (created by the Trusts in 1996), and its "Clear the Air" initiative, a coordinated national effort launched in 1999, have significantly contributed to the development of stronger air-emission policies in four states, and encouraged decisive action by the Environmental Protection Agency to adopt two rules mandating significant reductions in power-plant emissions in addition to bringing the largest enforcement action in history against aging power plants.

For much of the past decade, the Trusts have focused a great deal of attention on investments to protect old-growth forests and wilderness areas on public lands in the United States and Canada. As part of this effort, we have initiated and supported a series of regional and national public education campaigns focused on land-management planning issues. To date, these projects have contributed significantly to achieving permanent protection for more than 100 million acres of critical forest and wilderness habitat in North America. The most recent of these efforts, the Heritage Forest Campaign, has united more than 500 conservation groups nationwide in the effort to achieve permanent protection of up to 60 million acres of wilderness areas within America's national forests--almost double the amount of wilderness protected on national forest land since the establishment of the National Forest Service roughly 100 years ago.

Finally, we have been working to build a broader base for conservation advocacy on public-land issues. To that end, in 2000, we initiated the Pew Wilderness Center and the Canadian Boreal Trust, which will coordinate, expand and enhance our forest and wilderness protection efforts in North America in the years ahead.

Our marine work is predominantly focused on halting the decline of fisheries in U.S. waters along with protecting a variety of other marine species, including seabirds, marine mammals and invertebrates, together with the habitat on which they depend. This work is undertaken through a series of major initiatives launched by the Trusts over the past several years such as SeaWeb, the Ocean Law Project, the Regional Fisheries Initiative and Restore America's Estuaries. These efforts utilize communications, public education, law and science to increase public awareness about the crisis affecting the oceans; develop a broader understanding of the ecological and socioeconomic impact of human activities on the sea; ensure that current laws aimed at protecting the marine environment are respected by those government agencies charged with managing marine resources; and promote stronger public policies designed to safeguard the biological integrity of marine ecosystems and the life they harbor.

This past year, such initiatives and others played a significant role in securing: the approval of an international plan to restore the population of North Atlantic swordfish to healthy levels in 10 years; the adoption of 20 important measures to help conserve specific fish stocks in virtually every region of the country; a series of landmark court decisions that have closed over 7.5 million square miles of U.S. territorial water to destructive fishing practices; the adoption of measures by the state of Hawaii that will dramatically reduce the practice of shark finning in Hawaiian waters; and approximately $275 million in federal funding over 5 years for estuarine restoration projects in the United States. The Pew Oceans Commission, a group of distinguished Americans led by former White House Chief of Staff Leon Panetta, began its work in 2000 to make recommendations to the nation regarding ways in which to protect and sustainably manage America's living marine resources in the 21st century.

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