SNAPP: Poverty, Environmental Sustainability, and Regional Economic Development in the Central Appalachian Coalfields

The Appalachian coalfields of Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia currently support millions of acres of intact forest lands that are resilient to climate change and contribute significantly to the connectedness of habitats across the eastern United States. In addition, approximately 2.4 million acres of former forest lands that have been or are being surface mined offer significant opportunities for carbon sequestration. At the same time, the coalfields are among the most impoverished areas in the US, and much of the region relies on coal mining activity as its sole economic driver. The decline of the coal industry has long been forecast, and is now widely acknowledged. Efforts are now underway to diversify the economies of the coalfields region to include renewable energy development, tourism, and a revived forest products industry. We propose to develop a multi-objective landscape analysis that will help regional decision makers balance economic growth, provisioning of ecological services, climate adaptation, and human well-being. We are assembling a working group that includes not only experts in economic modeling, rural sociology, ecology, forestry, tourism, and policy, but also local practioners of community economic development that understand the unique culture, opportunities, and constraints of the Appalachian coalfields. This group will collaborate to develop a spatially explicit model of economic and ecological values that can predict the benefits to people from multiple land use scenarios. The model will incorporate numerous ecological, economic and social datasets including the Conservancy’s Connected and Resilient Landscapes, topographic, geologic and soil data from USGS, NLCD landcover data, Surface meteorology and Solar Energy datasets from NASA, the American Community Survey and SAIPE (Small Area Income and Poverty Estimates) and the Census of Governments from the U.S. Census Bureau, REIS (Regional Economic Information System) from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, and county level economic data from IMPLAN. The final product with be a set of scenarios for the region that indicate where conflicts exists among potential uses and suggested strategies to optimize among the three key elements of human well-being: economic, environmental, and social value. Results will be presented to regional stakeholders in a culturally appropriate format to be determined collaboratively by the working group. In addition, one or more peer reviewed publications will be prepared and web tools will be created and hosted on the TNC Conservation Gateway website to permit widespread access to data and results.

The information here may be out of date, please refer to https://snappartnership.net/ for more current information.