Wal-Mart Stores Inc. — already one of the nation’s leading conservation supporters through its partnership with the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation — is doubling down on that investment.
In 2005, the retailer started a program called Acres for America. The goal was to spend $35 million throughout the next decade to help purchase or preserve one acre of land for every acre that had been developed by the company. That was a big order. Wal-Mart owns enough land to be its own small country (with more revenue than many countries’ GDPs).
In the 10 years since, the Acres for America money, paired with matching grants and other funds has protected more than a million acres — an area comparable in size to Montana’s Glacier National Park.
“As of today, the Acres for America program has conserved more than 10 acres of vital habitat for every acre of land Wal-Mart has developed since its founding in 1962,” the company announced last week, when it said it was renewing the program for another 10 years with another $35 million.
The money has been used for conservation easements and outright land acquisitions in key areas near protected lands such as national parks and wildlife refuges. Through its competitive grant process, the program has leveraged Wal-Mart’s initial $35 million investment to generate more than $352 million in matching contributions for a total conservation impact of approximately $387 million.
“We began this journey in 2005, and we are astounded by what it has become over the past 10 years,” John Clarke, vice president of store planning for Wal-Mart, said in a statement making the announcement.
In eastern Maine, the Acres for America initiative acquired a conservation easement that prevented forest fragmentation across 312,000 acres of wildlife habitat. This easement was the second-largest of its kind in U.S. history at that time, according to the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, and guaranteed “perpetual public access” for hunting, hiking, fishing, birding and boating.
At Yellow River Ravines in Florida, the money was used to buy 11,313 acres that connects existing conservation lands to form a protected landscape of more than 834,000 acres of longleaf pine and bottomland hardwood forests.
The money has protected, among other places, tidal bay shoreline in Texas, redwoods in California, flyway habitat critical for migrating birds along the Platte River and protected headwaters timberland in Oregon.
Closer to home, the Acres for America money has been used for three Ozark projects identified as high priority conservation areas by the Arkansas chapter the Nature Conservancy.
In 2013, a $550,000 grant to the Nature Conservancy from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation was paired with $750,000 in matching funds to acquire 608 acres along the Kings River in Northwest Arkansas, adding two miles of river and riparian corridor to the Nature Conservancy’s 4,585-acre Kings River Preserve. The Kings River is a top Ozark smallmouth stream before it empties into Table Rock Lake.
A year earlier, a $790,000 National Fish and Wildlife Foundation grant to the Nature Conservancy was paired with more than $3.1 million in matching money, including state money, to buy 1,954 acres of forest along Beaver Lake, preserving habitat and creating additional public access, as well as reducing sediment entering the lake. It is known as the Devil’s Eyebrow Natural Area, which has “one of the highest concentrations of rare plant species in Arkansas, with several species typically found far to the north and others that are restricted in distribution and considered globally rare,” according to the Arkansas Natural Heritage Commission.
Another 408 acres were recently acquired by the Nature Conservancy adjacent to the natural area. That area is known as Rob and Melani Walton Preserve, although that was not done through the Acres for America funding.
One of the first grants, for $400,000 in 2005, helped acquire a conservation easement on 1,226 acres of Smith Creek along Arkansas’ upper Buffalo River to protect the largest Indiana bat hibernation area in the state, and it also connected several large forest conservation areas. Without the acquisition, the Nature Conservancy said the land probably would have been developed, which would have negatively affected the federally endangered Indiana bats, as well as water quality in the cave and in Smith Creek, which would have impacted water quality in the Buffalo National River.
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