Conservation Innovation Lab Report

Now in its third year, PERC’s Conservation Innovation Lab has grown significantly while staying grounded in its roots and mission. Founded on the idea that PERC should put its proverbial money where its mouth is by testing incentive-based conservation approaches in the real world, the innovation lab has partnered with ranchers, conservation organizations, and researchers.

As the innovation lab, our role is not to solve every conservation challenge ourselves, but to take the risks that others may be unable to take, test new approaches, learn from both successes and failures, and share the lessons we learn so others can build on them. We believe that experimenting and accepting the risk of failure are essential to advancing conservation. That pioneering and risk-taking spirit sparked our creation, and it will continue to guide our work.

Since its founding in 2023, the Conservation Innovation Lab has sprouted from four on-the-ground land, water, and wildlife conservation projects in Montana into just shy of 50 projects nationwide. We’ve supported diverse conservation approaches innovated by producers, researchers, and conservation professionals. These approaches impact natural resources far and wide, from pollinator habitat in Wisconsin to grizzly bear populations in Montana, from riparian corridors in Colorado to forests facing wildfire risks in California.

This growth didn’t happen overnight. It is thanks to our dedicated team at PERC as well as a network of incredible partners. These partnerships took time to build and nurture so that the lab could understand our partners and their circumstances, which helps us better support their work and help create meaningful conservation outcomes. At our core, the lab believes in supporting the creativity that comes from those closest to a problem. We can’t solve much if we sit in the office and pretend to have the answers. We must seek solutions where problems actually exist and persist. This may not always be the easiest or the fastest way to achieve conservation outcomes, but we think it is certainly the most effective.

We welcome this chance to say thank you to all of our partners and supporters. Without you, our work would not be possible. We appreciate you and look forward to continuing to work together.

Among the hustle and bustle of year-end tasks is the exciting opportunity to look forward. Now that the Conservation Innovation Lab has three years of trials, errors, and learning under its belt, we are poised for an exciting future. Over the coming years, we will continue to approach problem-solving with a partner-first mentality and continue to support the innovations and creativity of those whose actions impact conservation most directly. We will continue to wrestle with the biggest challenges facing land, water, and wildlife conservation and explore and implement new tools to tackle them. While we are pleased with the numerical growth of the past three years, the number of projects will never be our ultimate measure of success. Instead, our guiding metrics will be the quality and impact of partnerships we build, the effectiveness of our approaches, and the conservation outcomes that benefit our partners.

To achieve the innovation lab’s vision for the future, we have several significant goals for 2027:

• Identify the biggest conservation concerns of the future so we can be ready with the tools to address them
• Launch partnership-driven projects to test innovative ideas at the scale needed to answer questions about the effectiveness of new conservation tools
• Find ways to repackage and redeploy some of our existing tools for new uses and geographies
• Continue to support leasing state and federal lands for conservation purposes
• Deploy a suite of private lands conservation tools to work toward conserving an entire western big-game migration corridor

All of these efforts will be partner-driven and partner-informed.

In the accompanying pages, we welcome you to review how we have put our ideas into action, the scientific foundation of our work, lessons we’ve learned along the way, and how we hope our learnings can improve conservation outcomes nationwide and beyond.

We are always looking to test creative approaches to conservation challenges. Don’t hesitate to let us know if there’s a way we can support a conservation effort near and dear to you.