America the Beautiful Gets a Boost

The Biden-Harris administration has been on a tear recently passing multiple important rules tightening vehicle emissions standards, regulating PFAS in drinking water, increasing royalties for drilling on public lands, and launching a new conservation website.

Another big announcement was made Thursday, April 18th, 2024 and made national news headlines when the BLM finalized a new rule that enables leasing of public lands for conservation purposes. Historically, public lands could be leased for activities like grazing, drilling, and mining, but this is the first time the BLM has allowed conservation and restoration leases covering the nearly 245 million acres under administration by the agency.

American the Beautiful is the Biden-Harris administration’s initiative to leverage federal funds, private, and philanthropic giving to protect 30 percent of all US land and water by 2030. The new conservation.gov websites is intended to provide one-stop-shopping for users interested in conservation and climate change and also launches the new American Conservation and Stewardship Atlas that enables users to research existing conserved lands, identify federal restoration projects, forty datasets on dimensions of conservation such as terrestrial ecoregion of the US, carbon stocks contained in U.S. forests, interactive maps of conserved lands, tribal areas, and much, much more.