The Next 30,000 Acres

In 2002, The Land Conservancy of New Jersey (then the Morris Land Conservancy) developed a vision to preserve 30,000 acres. The vision identified broad opportunities and highlighted the impediments and the resources needed to achieve this goal. We called this effort the Preserve Now–Protect Forever campaign and engaged hundreds of supporters to join us in realizing this goal by contributing $3.3 million to the campaign. In September 2025, we achieved this vision by preserving our 30,000th acre.

We have now set a new goal, along with our conservation partners, for New Jersey to preserve an additional 500,000 acres by 2050. Only 1.4 million acres of privately owned, undeveloped land remains to be preserved—or developed—within the state. To help us achieve this aggressive goal, The Land Conservancy is committing to preserve another 30,000 acres by 2050. 

Achieving this ambitious statewide goal will require preserving an average of 20,000 acres of land per year over the next 25 years—a significant increase from the 5,600 acres preserved on average over the past five years. The good news is that the financial resources from local, county, state, and federal governments already exist to make this possible. The bad news is that a variety of regulatory hurdles are inhibiting this vision from being realized. Consequently, the pace of statewide land conservation has declined dramatically.

TLCNJ has released a report detailing how we will achieve the ambitious goal of preserving 30,000 acres in the next 24 years. We can get there by implementing a implementing a powerful combination of tools: forest easements, increased state funding matches, expanded tax incentives for landowners, and more staff at the state level and in our organization.

We're running out of time to save the precious natural resources New Jersey has left. Fortunately, there's a strong coalition determined to do so.