How to determine if a greenprint is right for you?
Curious about greenprints? Practitioners should ask certain questions when considering whether to develop a greenprint. This content aims to help determine what is needed for a successful greenprint and if developing a greenprint is right for you.
Key questions to get started
Science in action hero image: ALL INTERNAL RIGHTS. Research and field work at the Canyonlands Research Center at Dugout Ranch in Utah. © Stuart Ruckman
Find a greenprint hero: Chicago Park District volunteers plant a tree, spreading mulch in Burnham Park. © Emanuel Love
Santa Clara Greenprint hero: used in Case study section © TNC
Learn more about the five categories of key questions by scrolling through the information below.
In the greenprinting process, two distinct types of goals come into play: process goals and resource/benefit goals. Take a look at the examples of each and learn about the importance of establishing process goals early on to shape the approach.
Goals
Process Goals
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Explore a range of social and process benefits that can be achieved through a well-designed engagement and execution plan for greenprinting, such as:
- Facilitating balanced growth through multi-benefit planning
- Guiding investments in conservation and green infrastructure
- Establishing an inventory of current land use conditions
- Advocating for the value of conservation and natural infrastructure to stakeholders and the public
- Enhancing data accessibility and democratization
- Cultivating cross-sector partnerships and collaborations
- Addressing barriers to inclusive planning, with an emphasis on equity
- Encouraging youth involvement in decision-making processes
- Building a shared vision and foundation for future collaborative endeavors
- Setting the stage for policy development and public funding opportunities
Resource/Benefit Goals
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Explore what kinds of natural resource and community outcomes your Greenprint can deliver, including:
- Safeguarding water quality and ensuring an adequate water supply
- Preserving and sustaining working lands such as farms, ranches, and forests
- Protecting the connectivity of wildlife habitats
- Maintaining biodiversity and preventing species loss
- Storing carbon to mitigate the effects of climate change
- Protecting climate refugia to facilitate species adaptation
- Safeguarding cultural resources and fostering Indigenous connections to the land
- Expanding access to nature and promoting outdoor recreation opportunities
- Ensuring access to healthy food options
- Reducing exposure to environmental risks like flooding and extreme heat
- Protecting vulnerable coastal areas from various threats
- Restoring and preserving ecosystem services
- Identifying and mitigating climate risks for enhanced resilience
- Providing easy access to environmental data to infrastructure agencies to help reduce risks to their projects
Geography
What is the right scale and size?
Defining the geographic boundaries of a greenprint is crucial to establishing and achieving overarching goals. This decision should reflect politically and ecologically sensible limits that resonate with participants, users and decision-makers.
While considering factors like partner engagement and effective implementation, critical questions arise, such as whether the boundary includes service areas of crucial partners, spans relevant areas for political decision-makers, or aligns ecologically with nature- based boundaries like watersheds or eco-regions.
These decisions also relate to the data that will be gathered and the scale of the engagement (and resources) planned. The larger the area, the more stakeholders to manage and the more regional data will be needed. Smaller areas may be able to use fine-scale data and hands-on engagement with local partners, but the results will be smaller in scale.
Greenprints can be designed to match up with existing defined geographies such as a county or watershed, or they can be designed to overcome geographic barriers that hinder regional collaboration and planning.
Geography considerations
- Greenprint goals
- Datasets desired and available
- Geography where change or action is sought
- Location and jurisdiction of partners
- Ecological regions
- Resources (funding and time)
Engagement
Who will create, benefit from, and use the greenprint?
Identifying users, decision-makers, and additional partners is pivotal in shaping an effective process and Greenprint. Typically, a select group of core partners takes charge of process design. At the same time, decisions regarding data inclusion or exclusion may be delegated to a smaller team of technical experts.
Occasionally, the prioritization or weighting of resource/benefit goals involves a larger partner group, employing methods like voting or consensus-based deliberation.
Potential categories of users and partners include the groups below:
- Local governments and planners
- Conservation organizations
- Public infrastructure agencies (water, transportation, and energy)
- Natural resources agencies
- Farmers and ranchers, farmworkers and farm families
- Environmental justice groups and other local NGOs
- Public health sector/ health agencies
- Funders
- Tribal groups and Indigenous communities
- Developers
- Elected officials
- Infrastructure and ecological planning consultants
Outreach
What approaches will be used to engage users and other partners?
Engagement strategies range from interviews or meetings with a select group of key partners to a more formal series of meetings or gatherings designed to grow interest and investment in the greenprint over time.
One key element of an engagement plan may include equity-driven outreach using multiple approaches such as evening meetings or providing childcare or carefully selecting meeting location to reduce barriers to participation for underrepresented and marginalized community members.
All forms of engagement require significant funding to be successful, including, as examples, professional facilitation, food and other amenities, facility rental, and adaptive technologies such as signing or translation.
Possible outreach approaches include:
- Meetings and workshops designed to share and gather information: closed advisory group meetings, focused meetings with technical experts, open community meetings, webinars
- One-on-one conversations between new audiences and trusted partners
- Interviews, focus groups
- Online or paper surveys, telephone polling, texting-based polling
- Speak-outs and intercept surveys (going to where community members are rather than having them come to you)
- Youth-focused engagement, arts-focused engagement, or health-focused engagement
- Community science or data gathering
- Web-based mapping platforms
Science and Data
What data will be incorporated? How will data represent goals/themes?
Incorporating relevant data is crucial to greenprinting, ensuring essential natural resources, and benefit goals information about the built environment and social or community data are represented.
This may involve integrating specific datasets such as soil data from the USDA for preserving farmland or demographic data from the U.S. Census to address equity considerations. Understanding partner expectations regarding data transparency is also important, as some may prioritize democratizing access while others may require privacy for sensitive information.
Ultimately, the data included in greenprints should be analytically valuable and based on the best available scientific knowledge.
Themes
What themes are relevant to the greenprint collaborators, partners, goals and project area?
Themes provide an important framework for greenprints. They help users connect with issues that are relevant to their work while facilitating a cross-sector, multi-benefit approach to problem-solving.
Themes help focus a greenprint’s goals, create categories of expertise for outreach and engagement, and narrow down data needs. Most greenprint processes will begin with a few known themes, but during exploration and engagement, additional themes may be added or refined.
Examples of themes include:
- Community
- Agriculture
- Resilience
- Water Resources
- Environmental Justice
- Biodiversity
- Urban Greening
- Carbon
- Air Quality
- Recreation
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- Up-to-date (for some resources data may not change, so older is fine)
- Useful resolution (time and space) for decision-making Provide practical information for planning
- Cover the entire study area so data is useful for comparison (possible rare exceptions)
- Datasets that aggregate multiple important data sources in ways that reflect project goals
- Use fewer, higher-quality datasets to avoid “muddy” analysis
- Publicly available (or feasible to access and share)
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- Recommended by experts
- Trusted by partners
- Preferably peer-reviewed, used in research
- Used in other plans
- Used by funders
What will the greenprint look like?
The last important question to consider is how the greenprint will be presented. The core partners, with input from users and other advisors, have the task of deciding the most suitable format that will:
A final greenprint can take different forms, including a static map or set of maps, recommendations and strategies, a printed report, or an interactive decision-support tool enabling customizable queries and scenario building. Greenprints have the flexibility to describe existing resources, incorporate partner input and value judgments, and provide prescriptive implementation steps. They can also be in the form of StoryMaps for public outreach or education or online hubs prioritizing data-sharing among technical experts.
Final greenprints may include one or many of the following elements:
- A report describing resources, context, challenges, contributors, and opportunities
- Collaboratively developed shared language (for example, vision statement, guiding principles, key definitions)
- Recommendations for implementation
- Static map
- Web-based map
- Online data sharing platform
- Interactive decision-support tool
- Custom weighting and prioritization
- Pre-set partner priorities
- Scenario modeling
Capacity
What resources are necessary for developing a greenprint?
The availability of resources significantly influences the greenprinting process and the final greenprint. It affects the speed at which the greenprint can be completed, its complexity, the number of partners that can be engaged, and the amount of data that can be gathered and processed. This concern requires taking a hard look at overall funding and capacity requirements, including time and expertise. Specifically, deeper community engagement and the development of advanced decision-support tools impose substantial cost and capacity demands.
There are several key questions to ask related to resources and achieving the greenprint’s goals:
- Are the necessary partners invested in the process? Do relationships already exist that will support the greenprinting process, or do those relationships need to be developed?
- To what degree is a particular partner or public community engagement process necessary to ensure the process and product are successful?
- Are there partners whose participation would need to be supported financially?
- How much staff time, technical expertise, and external funding would be required to create the ideal greenprint?
- Are external consultants and contractors needed to support developing the greenprint, including support for engagement, technical analysis, mapping, or tool design?
- What funding is available? (Many greenprints are funded through a mix of public and private sources, often including municipal contracts; local, state, and federal grants; and philanthropic grants.)
- What needs to be scaled back to reflect the realistic capacity and funding?
How will the greenprint be managed and funded after it is developed?
- Is a person, organization or group of partners responsible for advocating for and tracking how the greenprint is used/implemented?
This is another important capacity related question to address early in the scoping and greenprint development proces. Key questions include:
- If the greenprint involves an online tool or data hub, where will that be hosted, and who will be responsible for updating data (and at what intervals)?
- Will there be longer-term funding available to support maintenance and updates of online tools and datasets?
- Is a person, organization, or group of partners responsible for advocating for and tracking how the greenprint is used/implemented?
- Is there a system in place for assessing the success of the greenprint and adapting how it is being used?
- Will longer-term funding be available to support ongoing collaboration, tracking, and assessment of implementation?
- Will the greenprint be integrated into the planning or decision-making of specific organizations or public agencies? If so, what does that mean for how the greenprint needs to be managed in the longer term?
- Can the greenprint itself be used to help leverage additional public or private funding for implementation? If so, who will lead efforts to make this happen?