Publications
Ernst Consulting conducts in-depth research on issues related to climate, health, social justice and public land, and translates the findings into policy recommendations and actionable strategies for practitioners. She incorporates innovative case studies throughout her work to encourage peer learning and replication.
(click on images to view reports)
Public Land for Public Good: Advancing community stewardship of public land explores how community land trusts, transformative land banks, public land for public good legislation, and partnerships between agencies and communities can transform vacant land into green, healthy and vibrant community-serving spaces, with examples from across the U.S. and Puerto Rico.
Central Texas Interfaith
Central Texas Interfaith: Transforming vacant land into vibrant community spaces explores how residents, students, community-based organizations and institutions can come together to transform vacant public land into vibrant community-serving spaces. These case studies are a companion to the Public Land for Public Good policy report.
Active Parks, Healthy Cities distills the findings of the National Study of Neighborhood Parks into recommendations for designing, programming, marketing, and measuring use in order to activate and increase physical activity in neighborhood parks. Recommendations focus on increasing activity for groups found to be underserved by parks, including teen girls and seniors.
A Smart Investment for America’s Health examines the impact of close-to-home parks and trails on human and environmental health, with a focus on the role of parks and green infrastructure in addressing racial and economic health disparities and climate vulnerability.
This report highlights the economic benefits of investing in urban parks, and how investments from the Land and Water Conservation Fund have leveraged significant private investment and generated substantial economic growth for cities.
Principles of Successful Park Partnerships
This workshop curriculum synthesizes extensive research on cross-sector and cross-agency partnerships and describes the ten principles key to creating effective and sustainable partnerships.
This report analyses the tools and data currently available to cities for climate change decision support. It identifies the interests, needs and capacity of potential users in local governments and nonprofits, and is intended to help inform the development of more effective decision support tools for climate planning.
The Equitable Park Funding Hub is a searchable online resource library with information on funding for parks and green infrastructure in under-resourced communities. The hub includes detailed information on funding for brownfields, climate resilience, community development, conservation and stormwater management and includes case studies and links for further information.
Protecting the Source: The Future of America’s Drinking Water provides a strong case and a set of best practices for using land conservation as a drinking water protection strategy. The report includes original research by Caryn Ernst on the link between land conservation and drinking water treatment costs.
The Source Protection Handbook is the manual for implementing many of the policy recommendations in Protecting the Source. It brings together lessons learned during years of field work by TPL staff and AWWA members and presents some of the best practices for protecting drinking water sources.
