Our history
What We Do
At COCO we foster collaborative conservation initiatives by:
◊ Mentoring placed-based collaborative organizations and providing financial, technical, and staff support.
◊ Working to support organizations that address local conservation issues through an inclusive community-based approach.
◊ Engaging and educating local, regional and national leaders on some of the most pressing conservation issues of our time.
◊ Recognizing that passionate and engaged people are the source of action for restoration projects. We support these people and help to increase the capacity of the groups they work with. More importantly, we share and celebrate their successes in making positive, sustainable change in their communities and restoring the lands we all depend on.
What We Believe
◊ We care about people and the planet, not one or the other. Community values and economic sustainability are pillars of our approach.
◊ We believe that groups of people working together have the best chance of addressing complex problems, and leveraging the greatest number of resources and assets. No single individual, business, organization, or government can fix the difficulties facing our planet and its people. By working together, a robust mixture of stakeholders can actually drive positive change, mitigate challenges, and build resiliency for society.
◊ We believe in utilizing adaptive management and formulating decisions based on the best available science. We believe in monitoring, researching, and documenting our outcomes with factual data. We believe that the lessons learned by studying our work, are imperative for long-term success and that we learn as much from our not-so-fruitful endeavors as from our most fruitful ones.
RENEWWEST
Scaling up conservation markets - COCO was the recipient of a $175K U.S. Natural Climate Solutions Accelerator Grant from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and The Nature Conservancy to kickstart the largest single site carbon-focused reforestation project in US history with RenewWest.
The grant allowed RenewWest to locate and perform a carbon project feasibility analysis on the burn scar left by the 2012 Barry Point fire in California. The analysis determined the project to be financially viable, which allowed RenewWest to pursue further funding and ultimately plant over 2 million trees on nearly 10k acres. Without COCO's initial support, this would have never been possible.
COLD FIRE
The Problem: Wildfires. The Solution: Mushrooms. COCO is investing in innovation. COCO helped launch and is co-funding a project monitoring the carbon sequestration potential of fungally produced composts. When COCO's Chief Science and Technology Officer, Jeff Ravage, was conducting experiments on how to break down wood removed during pre-wildfire migration treatments, his team discovered the incredible carbon sequestration potential of their work. He is now leading the project on investigating the carbon contents of post-decay composts produced by white and brown rot fungus both in situ and in the lab. These techniques could aid in the natural sequestration of carbon in soils.
Short of relying on natural systems, and their normal schedules, we don't have a lot of novel methods of sequestering carbon. Jumpstarting fungal decay of waste woody materials might just provide a solution.
AFTER THE FLAMES
Actionable best practices for communities and agencies impacted by wildfires. In 2019, COCO hosted the first After The Flames conference, bringing together hundreds of researchers, practitioners, and community members responding to the post-wildfire landscape. The past few years After The Flames has consisted of virtual events, but the conference will convene in person again in 2024.
Over the last 38 years, wildfires have burned an average of 5.2 million acres annually in the United States. Much of the cost of recovery and restoration is borne by state and local entities and those residents and businesses who live and work in and around the fire scar. There are communities across the country that have been working hard to improve how we live with fire for many years, yet the work has been slow within the post-fire sector. COCO seeks to increase capacity to help communities respond and recover from wildfires and strengthen post-fire response in order to reduce impacts on communities and ecosystems.