The official nonprofit organization representing the United States national parks has received notification that it is about to receive the largest philanthropic donation in its history.
The Lilly Endowment has provided $100 million to the National Parks Foundation (NPF) to protect our parks’ most fragile ecosystems.
Some national parks, such as Glacier or Canyonlands, are designed to protect entire areas of pristine landscape, while others were established to protect very small areas of very sensitive ecosystems, such as Biscayne Bay and the Channel Islands.
To this end, Lilly Endowment Inc. has announced that the $100 million will be used to protect ecosystems that are at imminent risk of destruction.
AP reported that the money will be used to meet needs at sites outside the 63 national parks, said Will Shafroth, president and CEO of the NPF, more than 400 of which are managed by the National Park Service.
Recent work by the NPF includes restoring coral reefs in Biscayne Bay National Park and other parks with reefs, reintroducing wild trout species to western parks, and protecting the most fragile ecosystems. Shafroth expects the first round of grants from the Lilly donation will go to those areas.
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Over the course of the 21st century, the backlog of deferred maintenance at national parks grew to around $7 billion. The Great American Outdoors Act, passed by the 116th Congress and signed by President Trump, attempted to remedy this problem by permanently reinstating the Land and Water Conservation Fund, a mechanism that diverts 50% of all revenues from the sale of energy (coal, oil, natural gas) on federal lands to conservation grants.
Congress estimated that this would bring national parks $9.5 billion over five years, but a recent NPS review of maintenance needs found that the funding needed is about $24 billion.
With this in mind, the NPF has launched a fundraising campaign to find private donors to contribute some of the difference. Lilly is the first to contribute.
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Philanthropic donations like Lilly’s are critical because they enable the NPS to act promptly and tackle time-sensitive and critical projects while, like all other federal agencies, it is busy negotiating and allocating budget resources, the NPF said.
“For more than 50 years, private philanthropy has played an important role in bridging the gap between parks’ needs and available funds. This grant will allow us to increase our efforts to ensure our national parks remain accessible to all for future generations,” President Shafroth said in a statement.
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