Working Watersheds: Restoring Forests & Economies

Working Watersheds is a state-wide effort led by the Economic Restoration Institute to build a sustainable timber industry, a critical part of restoring healthy forests and watersheds. Working Watersheds is quickly gaining state-wide support for four reasons:

• Colorado forests are highly unhealthy due to centuries of mismanagement, leading to catastrophic wildfire risk, negative impacts to biodiversity, and lost jobs. 
• Nearly all timber consumed in Colorado is imported, pushing our Timber and Forest Products industry to the brink of extinction, with limited ability to meet forest management needs.
• Tens of millions of tax dollars are spent to reduce wildfire risk and improve the health of our watersheds and forests, with little to no direct economic benefits such as job growth, supplying local markets with Colorado forest products, biomass energy, and products. 
• Working Watersheds provides direct economic values like new jobs and business opportunities, created while restoring forests and watersheds to a sustainable state.

Funds raised through Colorado Gives will be used to help develop the state-wide timber and forest products industry restoration plan, identify capital improvement needs in Colorado watersheds, and to initiate a pilot project for sustainable timber product development in Colorado. 

Diverse meadows like this are created by sustainable logging in Colorado forests, providing habitat for the threatened Pawnee Montane Skipper, increasing landscape level diversity for Abert's squirrels and other wildlife, and reducing risk of catastrophic wildfire.  

The Greatest Challenge

The greatest challenge we face in Colorado is that most traditional foundations and government grants do not support such programs. This makes you an essential part of Working Watersheds. 

Matching your donation 2:1 (up to $5,000)

For every $100 you give, another $200 will be provided by our donors. 

Social & Environmental Benefits of Working Watersheds

Working Watersheds produces economic values like sustainable business opportunities and jobs, and important benefits like: 

• Reducing wildfire risks, with benefits to land, homes, and people; 
• Producing biomass energy (e.g., from branches removed from trunks) to power homes, businesses, and communities;
• Reducing carbon emissions and other pollutants associated with burn piles and the 2,000-mile shipping distance of imported timber;
• Reducing environmental externalities, such as clear cutting of old growth forests in Canada; 
• Increasing biological diversity at landscape scales;
• Improving water quality; and
• Increasing local food production, via increased capacity for grass-finished beef, bison, and other animals.

Residual biomass from forest thinning, used to generate renewable electricity.

Learn more about Working Watersheds, and how to support ERI by visiting www.economicrestoration.org

A summary article about the state of Colorado's timber and forest products industry is found on ERI’s Eco-Nomics Insights article on Working Watersheds. 

Working Watersheds produces landscapes with high economic, ecological, and social value, not an overcrowded landscape waiting for the next fire to consume it.

The long-term financial strategy of Working Watersheds is to develop alternative funding sources to managing our forests, including high value forest product markets to support sustainable forestry business in Colorado. This translates to creating and circulating local wealth and tax revenues, reducing the future burden on donors and taxpayers—a financially sustainable approach to minimize the need for long-term support from donors and foundations. 

Your donation today will help us get there!

A peak in productivity coincides with a peak in biological diversity.  Forest thinning is an economically beneficial way to shift overly-dense forests (late succession--right side of graph) toward the productive and diverse center, while reducing wildfire risk and restoring watershed health. 

About The Economic Restoration Institute

The Economic Restoration Institute (ERI) is a tax-deductible organization dedicated to restoring regional economies to a sustainable state, where industrial, social, and environmental needs are in balance. Learn more about our efforts in Colorado and elsewhere by visiting www.economicrestoration.org.  We are new this year, so we do not have a form 990 to share at this time.