Scaling Up

GOAL: Conserve 19.5 Million Acres of Grasslands Annually by 2034

JV8’s overarching goal is to maintain North America’s remaining Central Grasslands for local human communities, birds, and other wildlife between 2034 and 2044.

There’s No Time to Waste

More than 60% of Central Grasslands have been lost over the past 200 years, with more disappearing every year. To maintain grasslands for local communities, birds, and other wildlife, investments need to scale up to fund conservation actions on 27.8 million acres of grasslands every year by 2044, with a cumulative total of 375 million acres. To help address these issues, in 2024 JV8 published its JV8 Business Plan, a bold and ambitious blueprint that shows how to scale up grassland habitat stewardship and conservation through collaboration.

Strategies to Stem Grassland Loss

Mesic Restoration

JV8 has two priority strategies to scale up stewardship and conservation of Central Grasslands:

  • Strategy 1: Expand resilient and connected habitat conservation of at-risk grasslands.
  • Strategy 2: Increase capacity to steward working grasslands through regional and local partnerships.

What It Costs to Meet the Need

Every year more habitat is lost, making it harder to reach the net acres needed to conserve this biome. But if we act now and rapidly scale up available funding, we can still recover the Central Grasslands.
Conservation ActionCurrent Acres (JV8)
Habitat protection339,580
Habitat restoration434,707
Habitat enhancement579,502
Habitat persistence/retention854,588
Total2,208,377

JV8 Conservation Baseline (2022)

Mesic Restoration

Scaling Strategy for Conservation Actions, 2024-2044

A proposed scaling strategy for JV8 and other partners to implement conservation actions on 27.8 million acres annually by 2044, for a cumulative total of 375 million activity acres.

Scaling Up Conservation: Step-by-Step Goals

To realize the vision of stabilizing grassland loss trends by 2044, a rapid increase of funding to JV8 operations and to partner organizations and agencies is required.

  • Increase JV8 Operating Capacity funding from $200,000 to $500,000 per year to collaborate with more than 100 implementation partners across sectors and geographies.
  • By 2027, increase Partnership Capacity funding to $25 million per year to increase staffing from the current 50 positions to 200 positions.
  • By 2034, increase Resilient and Connected Habitat funding to $1.3 billion per year to implement conservation actions on 19.5 million acres annually.
  • By 2044, stabilize loss of grasslands and achieve conservation actions on 375 million cumulative acres at a cost of $1.9 billion per year with a multinational array of partners.
Photo Credits
  • Grassland: Photo: Rick Bohn PPJV
  • Mesic Restoration: Photo: Beth Beckers NGPJV