APRIL 25, 2025…..New England’s largest nature-based conservation organization is pressing forward to address the impending threats of climate change and biodiversity loss across Massachusetts while maneuvering through a moment of federal hostility to conservation and clean energy efforts.
Mass Audubon, at 129 years old, is leading the push for an increase in state conservation investments. Its president and CEO, David O’Neill, has spent years in the conservation sector at organizations like the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation and the National Audubon Society. He’s now at the helm of the 160,000-member nonprofit that leverages both public and private funding to conserve and restore land, advocate for environmental policies and offer educational programs.
In a recent conversation with the News Service, O’Neill talked about where nature-based climate solutions fit into the state’s climate goals, how Mass Audubon wants Massachusetts to invest more in conservation, and the ways the organization is adjusting to federal funding and policy threats.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
Q: Checking in on the temperature of this moment — what is on your mind? How are you approaching this work right now?
A: It’s extremely chaotic. It’s uncertain. And uncertainty and chaos create a lot of challenges for an organization, both internally in terms of how your staff is feeling about the work and the headwinds facing the work that we care deeply about, but also externally in terms of, what implications does this have on our ability to deliver our mission? We need to be planning ahead on how we navigate through this in a smart and sensible way so that we can continue to deliver on a mission that’s been around for 129 years — through World War I, through the Great Depression, through World War II, through a pandemic. In uncertain times, Mass Audubon’s mission is more important than ever. It’s not only a mission of conservation, but there’s a societal value that it provides people in periods of uncertainty. There’s lot of internal work to keep the team focused on the mission, a lot of scenario-planning for the uncertainty of what we’re living through right now, a lot of doubling down on the things we know we can make an imprint on, and then there’s some long-range planning.
Q: How are federal funding concerns manifesting in your work?
A: A whole partnership of land trusts and organizations came together to try to protect roughly 10,000 acres of land, and it was going to be [done with] our funding, plus local funding, plus a forest legacy grant out of the U.S. Forest Service. Right now, we believe that money is in jeopardy, and those are the kinds of things where we’re coming up with contingency plans on how we protect that land if the federal funds do not flow. We’re looking at a variety of different means of doing that, maybe making more private investment than we plan to make, finding other resources to protect that land. But there is no question that federal funding, federal permitting for wind — these things will impact our pace in meeting our goals, and it’s up to us to figure out how to work around those challenges, look ahead, position ourselves to move quicker when we have a supportive federal administration. Right now, obviously, the administration is hostile to a lot of what we in the community of conservation and climate care deeply about.
Q: Mass Audubon wants the state to increase its efforts to address climate change. But how do you push for greater environmental policy when those existing initiatives are no longer guaranteed to be reached?
A: There’s two sectors that we focus on relative to climate work. One is clean energy development, and two is natural and working lands and the role they play in sequestering carbon and mitigating against the impacts of climate change and adapting to those changes. On the clean energy side, we’re really frustrated, in terms of attempts to slow down permitting processes for offshore wind in particular, because that’s such an important part of what we need to accomplish in order to meet our clean energy goals.
On the natural and working lands side, there’s huge potential to make progress there. One of the things that we’re pushing for is creating a dedicated funding source for land conservation that supports the creation of urban parks that are critical to particularly under-resourced communities, as well as protecting large landscapes — big, forested blocks in Massachusetts. Without having a dedicated funding source for these kinds of things, we simply cannot meet our climate objectives, meet biodiversity targets that we assume will come out very soon, meet our 30-by-30 goal of protecting 30% of the commonwealth’s land by 2030. I think most everyone would acknowledge that. We’re advocating for using a percentage of the sporting goods sales tax that goes into the General Fund now, and redirecting that to a dedicated funding source for land protection efforts, for urban parks, for large blocks, or areas that can sequester carbon. This is a smidgen of the overall state budget that would be diverted to this purpose, but the outcome and the impact would be tremendous over a period of time, and absolutely critical to meeting our 30-by-30 goal.
Q: How is that push going? Any feedback from the State House?
A: We call it the “Nature for Massachusetts” campaign, born out of an analysis of what other states across the country have been doing to create these dedicated funding sources. There are 28 other states that have these dedicated funding sources. Maryland just met its 30×30 goal, in large part because it has a funding source of this type.
There is caution in everyone’s voice about the challenging state budget situation we find ourselves in. But the logic behind using the sporting goods sales tax to create a $100 million fund for land that benefits all communities across the commonwealth has been resonating quite well. We have 30-some House members, bipartisan, who have co-sponsored the bill, and I think we’re up to 10 senators, which is quite good progress for a bill that’s brand new. We’ve gotten really strong interest from the administration, I think they see the logic of this and the importance of this in meeting the ambitious and important goals that they’ve set. I’m very proud to be in a state that’s setting these ambitious goals. Now we need to create the mechanisms to be able to deliver on them. We started out with a small group of support on this, and very quickly we’re up to 40-some partners. I think that is representative of the need for this type of program. We have to look beyond the short-term financial challenges and think about the long-term benefits.
Q: What role do nature-based solutions play in the state’s adaptation and mitigation efforts?
A: It is really important for people to understand that nature plays a critical role in sequestering carbon in the commonwealth. Now, it represents roughly 10% of the solution. We would love for it to contribute to a larger percentage of the solution. Quite literally, if we meet all of our clean energy, transportation, buildings, etc. goals, we’d still have a gap to meet our net zero objectives, and that gap has to be filled by either nature or technology, likely a combination of the two. We simply can’t meet our goals without nature doing more.
It also is relatively cheap to protect land versus changing energy systems and transportation systems and so on. Those things are all important, but from a cost perspective, nature is just simply the lowest-cost solution. I think more people understand that nature is critical in terms of protecting community infrastructure from flooding and storm events that are growing in magnitude and fierceness. We understand that green infrastructure — when you put trees in, buffer waterways, mitigate or restore wetlands and marshes — protects community infrastructure that sits behind those natural systems and helps prevent the kind of impacts that occur from storm events. It’s also really important to adapt. We know seas are going to rise, we need to be able to adapt these systems over time, restoring marshes and protecting land behind marshes so they can have natural migration corridors. Nature also has this intrinsic value to all of us. We know more and more about the mental and human health benefits of nature and the value of that from an economic perspective, and it’s a very cheap way of helping to solve a lot of health challenges.
Q: How can the state do better when it comes to breaking down the barriers to access to natural spaces?
A: We need to do so much more to address the lack of resources that have gone into communities to make them healthy. A really important ingredient of that is nature, and having access to parks, trails and open spaces. We have to collectively make investments and commitments to communities that have not received adequate support. Historically, the level of funding that supports environmental justice communities, in particular, to create parks and open spaces is so much smaller than what you see spent on parks and open spaces in more affluent communities. That’s in large part because affluent communities can tax themselves to be able to create parks and open spaces that benefit their communities and their environment. Unfortunately, the state does not have the statewide funding source that allows dollars to flow into urban areas as much as they should.
Q: How is Mass Audubon trying to address that?
A: We’ve been working really hard, and the state has been a terrific partner in creating urban sanctuaries in environmental justice communities. I was inspired by the Boston Nature Center, one of our sanctuaries in Mattapan, so we committed to creating three more urban sanctuaries. We bought a [former] Christmas tree farm with two partners in Lowell, Lowell Parks & Conservation Trust and Mill City Grows [for one]. The other we’re working on is with Chelsea-based environmental justice organization, GreenRoots, and affordable housing community developer, the Neighborhood Developers, to protect roughly 18 acres of abandoned industrial site on the Chelsea Creek. The vision is to create a climate resilient park that will adjust and adapt to sea-level rise and protect the community, with a nature center and office space for GreenRoots, and up to 225 affordable housing units on-site. We would have housing and environment and conservation come together to provide a valuable asset to a community that has [little access to] green space.
We also have been working to make sure our sanctuaries are more accessible to people of all abilities, with the creation of what we call “all persons trails,” which are trails that are level, wide, more stable. They sometimes have interpretive elements to them, so that, if you are a person who’s visually impaired, there are Braille trail markers that can tell you what is around you at any moment in your walk. [We also are trying] to make our nature-focused camps more accessible to families that may not have high income levels, so we’ve created a sliding scale program — now 20% of all of our camper families are using this sliding scale scholarship program to access our camps.
Q: Can you talk a bit about Mass Audubon’s approach to coastal resilience?
A: There is an inspiring sanctuary we created a few years ago called Tidmarsh, in Plymouth. It’s this living example of what we would like to see happen more on our coastline. It was an old cranberry bog very close to the coastline, it’s about 465 acres. We bought the property, worked with partners to restore the property, removed the bog gates and dams and systems, and the system, over the last five years, has converted from a system that had one species of plant, the cranberry, to a sanctuary with over 600 species of plants and animals living in it. It’s just alive. Herring are running from the ocean into this sanctuary for the first time in 100 years. And then in the Great Marsh on the North Shore, we work with a suite of partners to try to restore the ecosystem. These marsh systems were once heavily used for agriculture, and therefore they were ditched, so water could move off of the marsh. The problem with that is that when marshes are ditched, the sediment that naturally comes into a marsh also runs out, and really what we need is sediment to stack up over time so the marshes elevate and can keep up with sea level rise and protect the infrastructure behind them — sewer plants, roads, homes, businesses.
Our effort to make that work easier for us to do is to remove rules and regulations, mostly permitting, that impedes our ability to do more of that work quickly and more cheaply. Streamlining the permitting process for ecological restoration, marsh restoration, wetlands restoration, dam removal, [would help us] do more ecological restoration on more acres at a lower cost. The state’s working on this, I’ll give them credit, but we feel like we need to do much more, much quicker. These marshes sequester 40 times more per acre of carbon than forest systems, so that idea of streamlining ecological restorations is a top priority.
Q: Speaking of more investment — advocates are waiting for an environmental bond bill to pop this session. What’s necessary, this time around, for the administration to get right?
A: Because these bond bills cover five or six years, we should not be looking at the immediate challenge facing our budget situation and pull back from our commitments to investment in the environment through the bond bill. If anything, we should be fighting harder for the resources necessary to meet our goals. There’s a concern that the bond bill will be smaller because of the current economic conditions — that wouldn’t be the right choice, as far as I’m concerned. I realize that, from the purely budgeting and economic situation that we’re in today, it’s hard. With that said, again, why are we backing away from this? These are authorizations of funds, and then they are appropriated. Let’s authorize what we need to authorize in order to be able to accomplish our goals in the bond bill. I would hate for us to be overly conservative at this moment in time when it comes to issues that are so important to the future of the commonwealth and to all of us, climate change being number one on that list.
Q: The state boasts about being a leader in climate efforts. Is that accurate in your eyes?
A: I’ve worked all across the country, and Massachusetts has absolutely been a leader. I think we now need to lean into implementation, and there are ways to do that that can be creative. Fixing our own challenges that get in the way of progress, making small but really impactful investments in this work that are critical.
One of the things that we did was, we realized it was going to be hard to reach 30% protected land by 2030 without a dedicated funding source. But instead of just waiting around for something like that to happen, we made a parallel strategy — we created a private fund of $75 million, we call it the “30×30 Catalyst Fund.” Raise $75 million in private funds. Use that to incentivize others to raise additional funds, including creating this dedicated funding source at the state level, but also use it to finance conservation work at a rate that would be roughly double of what we’re doing today. We’ve raised over $40 million of that $75 million [over the last year and a half]. We’re at roughly four times the pace of land conservation since we created the fund, and we’re working with partners, regional land trusts, local land trusts, the state, federal agencies, etc. We’re up to around 28% of the land conserved in Massachusetts, less than 100,000 acres away from meeting our 30-by-30 goal, and we have 20,000 acres in our pipeline. That’s a quarter of that overall goal, and that’s just Mass Audubon and our partners.
