December 2025 Edition – Volume 79, Issue 12
As NFWF launches its first NextGen Business Plan, states have a timely chance to align their wildlife action plans with long-term, large-scale investment and influence conservation for decades to come. At a time when conservation challenges are expanding faster than the capacity to meet them, a unique opportunity has emerged, one that connects the next generation of State Wildlife Action Plans (SWAPs) with the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation’s (NFWF) new 30-year NextGen Business Plans. This alignment offers an opportunity to link state-led conservation priorities with large-scale investment strategies that can shape the course of wildlife conservation for decades ahead.
The collaboration grew out of discussions among members of the AFWA–U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Joint Task Force on Landscape Conservation and NFWF about 18 months ago, exploring how the three partners (states, the Service, and NFWF) could work in a more strategically aligned and mutually reinforcing way. Those early conversations identified a shared opportunity to test how NFWF’s long-term investment framework could intentionally connect to the priorities and science that underpin State Wildlife Action Plans.
From Parallel Paths to Converging Frameworks
For two decades, SWAPs and NFWF’s business plans have advanced on parallel tracks. SWAPs, first completed in 2005 and revised in 2015, form the backbone of state-led, science-based conservation, built around eight core elements that identify species and habitats of greatest conservation need and guide monitoring, coordination, and public engagement. During that same period, NFWF’s plans evolved from Keystone Initiatives focused on individual species to Landscape Business Plans addressing ecosystems, watersheds, and partnerships.
Now, as states finalize their third-generation SWAPs and NFWF launches its NextGen Business Plans, the timing is serendipitous. Both frameworks are being renewed in 2025, opening a shared window to align planning and investment for the next 30 years.
The Southeast Pilot: A Model in the Making
NFWF
That alignment is being explored through the Southeast Forests and Rivers Pilot, the first of sixteen NextGen plans that will ultimately span the nation. The pilot builds on the longleaf-pine ecosystem, the same focus that anchored NFWF’s earlier Longleaf Forests and Rivers plan, while expanding to encompass a broader range of forest, grassland, and aquatic systems. In this way, the longleaf ecosystem remains core to a more inclusive regional framework that reflects both ecological and community interconnections.
The NextGen model marks a significant evolution in approach. It extends the planning horizon from 10 years to 30 years, creating space for more durable partnerships, adaptive learning, and long-term outcomes. It also moves from focusing on what is probable under foreseeable funding to what is needed to achieve lasting conservation results, a bold reframing that better matches investment strategies to the scale and urgency of the challenge. Together, these shifts illustrate how NFWF is building a more forward-looking approach to conservation design and implementation.
NFWF is also broadening its focus from targeted species conservation investments to whole-system outcomes, combining habitat-suitability modeling, ecosystem services, and community resilience. This marks a shift from transactional coordination toward a more relational, co-developed partnership that emphasizes shared learning and trust.
Because both SWAPs and NextGen plans operate on ten-year cycles, they will intersect twice more over the next three decades. This adaptive feedback loop means each new SWAP can inform NFWF’s next round of investment, while NFWF’s measurable outcomes can help guide future SWAP revisions.
Beyond a One-Off: Building a Pathway for Broader Alignment
While the Southeast pilot is the starting point, it is not yet a finished model. It is a learning process designed to test how state-led priorities can best inform NFWF’s long-term investment strategies. Each of the fifteen NextGen plans that follow will focus on different landscapes, but the pathway being developed now in the Southeast can help shape how those future alignments take form. The longleaf ecosystem and its partnerships provide the first proving ground, but the real value lies in establishing an approach that can evolve and transfer across regions over time.
Transitioning to full SWAP integration will not happen all at once. It will depend on the bridges and connective tissue that already link state and national efforts, such as the Southeast Conservation Adaptation Strategy (SECAS), the Midwest Landscape Initiative (MLI), the Northeast Landscape Committee, and western landscape initiatives, to connect planning with investment. Regionally Shared Species of Greatest Conservation Need (RSGCN) can also serve as integrators, linking biological priorities across state lines and aligning conservation design with NFWF’s outcome-based framework. Likewise, Conservation Opportunity Areas (COAs) identified through SWAPs and regional designs can spatially connect those priorities to on-the-ground implementation, providing another bridge between planning and investment.
The goal is clear: to make state-led priorities foundational within NFWF’s business plans. Exactly how that happens will depend on working together through iterative learning, shared capacity, and continued collaboration among states, NFWF, and their regional partners. The opportunity to define that pathway exists now, while both planning cycles are open and the potential for alignment is at its strongest. The key is flexibility: unified but not uniform. State biological priorities and regional coordination capacity can guide where and how large-scale investments are made.
NFWF
If successful, this approach will demonstrate how SWAPs can serve as a national biodiversity framework, connecting local action to continental-scale investment through shared science and sustained collaboration.
Anchored in AFWA’s Vision and the Relevancy Roadmap
This emerging alignment reinforces the goals of AFWA’s newly adopted Resolution 2025-04-05, A Vision for Fish and Wildlife Conservation in the Future. That resolution calls for raising awareness of and securing funding for third-generation SWAPs, recognizing them as the unifying blueprint for proactive, collaborative conservation across jurisdictions.
It also dovetails with AFWA’s Relevancy Roadmap, which emphasizes connecting conservation to community values: well-being, resilience, and economic vitality. NFWF’s NextGen framework echoes those same principles, linking ecological outcomes with social and economic benefits. By aligning with SWAPs, the NFWF business plans gain additional precision, credibility, and accountability, grounding large-scale investment strategies in the state-led science and priorities that Congress envisioned when it created the State Wildlife Grants Program.
Together, these frameworks position SWAPs as more than technical plans and NFWF’s business plans as more than funding strategies, they become mutually reinforcing instruments for unifying investment, policy, and public engagement.
Momentum Across Regions
NFWF
The convergence of planning and investment is also unfolding beyond the Southeast. In the Appalachian region, initiatives such as the Appalachian People and Places Collaborative and the Campaign for Appalachia are weaving biodiversity, cultural identity, and local economies into shared conservation goals.
This work increasingly reflects a One Health approach; recognizing that ecological integrity, community well-being, and economic vitality are deeply interdependent and must advance together.
Partners across these efforts have expressed strong interest in using SWAPs as a common biodiversity foundation that connects initiatives from Alabama to Canada, a vision consistent with the NFWF model now underway.
Why Acting Now Matters
NFWF expects to finalize the Southeast Forests and Rivers NextGen Business Plan by spring 2026, followed by fifteen additional plans. That means the blueprint for how SWAPs inform these plans and how regional partnerships are resourced to support them is being written now. At the same time, vulnerabilities in sustaining regional coordination capacity through partnerships such as SECAS, MLI and other landscape-level collaborations are creating challenges for maintaining continuity and shared learning at scale.
NFWF
Acting within this window underscores the essential role of regional coordination systems as the connective tissue linking state-led priorities in SWAPs to long-term, large-scale investment, and why sustaining that shared capacity will remain critical beyond this first phase of alignment.
Looking Ahead
This pilot offers an opportunity to build a practical and adaptable approach for linking state-driven science with broader-scale conservation investment, advancing AFWA’s vision and keeping SWAPs relevant and actionable for the long term.
It also creates an opportunity for NFWF and other partners to align their investments more closely with the priorities, data, and relationships that states and regions have cultivated over two decades of shared planning, making those investments more relevant, coordinated, and enduring.
By turning alignment into action, this collaboration can help ensure that large-scale conservation strategies stay connected to outcomes on the ground.