Conservation Is Infrastructure: Why Public Investment Must Support Both Development and Natural Systems

Communities need development. They need roads, bridges, housing, water systems, schools, utilities, stormwater facilities, and other public works that allow people to live safely, work productively, and access opportunity. Public investment in these systems is not only justified, it is essential. No healthy community can function without strong infrastructure and thoughtful development.

But there is a major gap in how we define infrastructure and how we invest in it.

While public agencies routinely commit enormous sums to built development and traditional infrastructure, they invest far less in the natural systems that also provide critical public services. Permanently conserved land, wetlands, floodplains, forests, riparian corridors, recharge areas, and urban open space are often treated as amenities, constraints, or afterthoughts. In reality, they function as natural infrastructure. They protect water quality, reduce flooding, moderate heat, sustain biodiversity, support recreation, improve public health, and make communities more resilient over time.

The issue is not that development receives too much attention. Communities absolutely should invest heavily in roads, utilities, housing, and public facilities. The problem is that natural infrastructure, despite providing equally important public benefits, receives nowhere near the same level of commitment.

The spending contrast is hard to ignore. State and local governments are estimated to provide corporations with as much as $90 billion per year in economic development subsidies. Separate reporting on tax abatements found that governments lost more than $18 billion in fiscal year 2023 alone to economic development tax breaks, and more than $93 billion from 2017 through 2022 in state and local tax abatements. These are huge public commitments designed to enable or accelerate growth.

Now compare that with several of the country’s major conservation funding tools. The USDA’s Agricultural Conservation Easement Program had $950 million available for fiscal year 2025. The Land and Water Conservation Fund’s State and Local Assistance Program reached a record $437.4 million in 2025. In 2025, the North American Wetlands Conservation Act provided $102.9 million for wetland conservation projects, leveraging about $201.2 million more in partner matching funds. Those are important programs, but even taken together, they remain far below the scale of public subsidy that routinely supports development.

That imbalance has consequences.

Too often, conservation is considered only after a development pattern begins to create visible problems. Flooding becomes more severe after wetlands are filled, floodplains are constricted, and too much land is covered with pavement. Heat intensifies after tree cover and natural land are replaced by roads, rooftops, and parking lots. Water quality declines as runoff moves faster across hardened surfaces, carrying pollutants into streams, lakes, and groundwater. Quality of life suffers when residents lose access to open space, clean water, healthy habitat, and the natural features that make a community attractive and livable.

At that point, communities are forced into an expensive cycle of repair. They pay to expand drainage systems, retrofit stormwater infrastructure, stabilize channels, restore damaged waterways, treat degraded water supplies, address heat impacts, and respond to disasters that could have been reduced through better land protection and planning from the start. In other words, public dollars are often spent first to support development, and then spent again to address the consequences of failing to conserve natural systems as part of that development.

This is a false economy.

The climate and resilience numbers make the point even more clearly. In 2024, the United States experienced 27 billion-dollar weather and climate disasters with total losses of about $182.7 billion. Over the long term, these costs are staggering. Since 1980, the nation has suffered hundreds of billion-dollar disasters costing trillions of dollars in total. Not every one of those losses is caused by local development choices, but development patterns absolutely affect whether wetlands can absorb water, floodplains can store flows, streams can function, and neighborhoods can withstand heat and storm events.

Heat is another clear example. In the United States, urban areas are typically about 1 to 7 degrees Fahrenheit hotter during the day and 2 to 5 degrees hotter at night than surrounding areas. That means higher cooling costs, greater health risks, more pressure on vulnerable residents, and a lower quality of life in neighborhoods with too little tree cover and too much heat-absorbing pavement.

Natural infrastructure should not be framed as being in competition with development. It should be understood as part of development. A healthy community needs both built systems and natural systems working together. Roads and utilities matter. So do wetlands and floodplains. Housing matters. So do stream corridors, groundwater recharge areas, farms, forests, and urban tree canopy. Economic growth matters. So does long-term resilience, public health, and the protection of the land and water systems that support daily life.

Natural infrastructure provides real and measurable services. Wetlands store and slow floodwaters. Floodplains absorb peak flows and reduce downstream damage. Forests and natural landscapes filter water, stabilize soils, and reduce erosion. Conserved lands protect drinking water sources and preserve agricultural productivity. Urban green space and tree canopy reduce heat, improve air quality, and make neighborhoods more livable. These are not abstract environmental values. They are practical public services with real economic value.

Conservation deserves the same seriousness that public policy gives to built infrastructure.

Permanent conservation should be integrated into planning, budgeting, and project design from the outset. It should be a standard part of how communities think about growth, not something left for later if flooding worsens, temperatures rise, streams degrade, or residents begin to feel the loss of open space and quality of life. If development is going to transform land, then conservation planning should be embedded in that transformation from day one.

The broader point is simple: communities should continue to invest strongly in development and traditional infrastructure because those systems provide critical services. But they should also recognize that natural infrastructure provides critical services too, and public investment in those systems remains far behind.

For too long, public spending has reflected a narrow definition of what makes a community function. We have funded what we build more readily than what sustains us. As a result, conservation is often asked to solve major public problems with a fraction of the commitment routinely directed toward growth and development.

That needs to change.

If communities want to be healthy, resilient, and economically strong, they must invest in both forms of infrastructure. Built infrastructure supports where we live, work, and move. Natural infrastructure supports the water we drink, the flood protection we depend on, the temperatures we endure, the landscapes that sustain us, and the quality of life that makes communities worth inhabiting in the first place.

Development is necessary. Conservation is necessary too.

The smartest public future is not one that chooses between them. It is one that finally funds both like they matter.

The figures noted above are sourced from recent public reporting from Good Jobs First, USDA/NRCS, Dept. of Interior, EPA, and NOAA.