Overview

The Trust for Public Land conserves land for people to enjoy as parks, gardens, and other natural places, ensuring livable communities for generations to come. We were founded in 1972 with goals of protecting land in and around cities and pioneering new land conservation techniques. Over the years, our work expanded to include projects from inner city to wilderness, and our broad experience has made us a national leader and innovator in city park creation, state and local conservation funding, and using GIS for conservation planning.

In 2008, TPL released Quantifying the Greenhouse Gas Benefits of Urban Parks, which aimed to inform local planning decisions around potential greenhouse gas benefits of green space and introduce methodologies for estimating potential greehouse gas reductions.

The Trust for Public Land works to protect the places people care about and to create close-to-home parks—particularly in and near cities, where 80 percent of Americans live. Our goal is to ensure that every child has easy access to a safe place to play in nature. We also conserve working farms, ranches, and forests; lands of historical and cultural importance; rivers, streams, coasts, and watersheds; and other special places where people can experience nature close at hand. 

• Parks for People: Working in cities and suburbs across America to ensure that everyone enjoys close-to-home access to a park, playground, or natural area.
• Our Land and Water: Working with communities to protect the land and water that keep us healthy, inspired, and connected with nature and each other.

We are committed to using our conservation expertise to help solve and mitigate the world's most pressing environmental problem, and are addressing climate change through three primary activities:

• Carbon Mitigation: Increasing carbon absorption by protecting and restoring large natural landscapes such as forests, wetlands, and grasslands.

  Climate Smart Cities: Helping build livable, energy-efficient, and attractive cities by creating comprehensive networks of parks, open spaces, and trails that support walking and biking.

  Resilient Landscapes: Conserving lands that protect communities from climate-driven threats, such as fire and flooding, and that safeguard clean drinking water and other natural resources.